With the 30th Anniversary of Peak Britpop™, and 20th anniversaries of early Indie Sleaze, there have been more than a few notable comebacks in the last couple of years. When Scottish band Franz Ferdinand released The Human Fear at the beginning of 2025, they scored their first UK # 1 Album in 20 years – but don’t call it a comeback. They been doing this for YEARS.
The Human Fear is the sixth Franz Ferdinand album proper, along with a couple of greatest hits compilations and a notable collaboration with Sparks called, brilliantly, FFS.
Ahead of their Nashville show at Cannery Hall on Friday, October 10, Alex Kapranos stopped by the studio to chat with WNXP’s Jude Mason.
The song that gave the new Franz Ferdinand album its name, “Hooked,” begins with the line “I’ve got the fear, I’ve got the human fear.” But writing a concept album was never the plan.
“That was actually the last lyric that was written,” said Kapranos. “And I remember seeing that line and kind of thought, ‘Oh gosh, you know, a lot of these songs are talking about different fears that we have as we go through life and things that we face.’ And I realized that, yeah, a lot of the themes of the album are about overcoming these fears that make us human.”
He continued: “I think overcoming fear is the greatest thing to make you feel alive. I mean, even every night when I go on stage, to expose yourself in front of all those people and sort of say, ‘Here I am,’ you’ve got to be in quite a vulnerable position to do that or to do it well. And you’ve got to overcome a certain amount of fear to do that. And it’s the best buzz you can get.”
A band who has been around for more than two decades has seen plenty shift in the music industry. It also means that the members of Franz Ferdinand have a clearer perspective on the things that stay the same.
“I think the music industry has always been changing. You know, like it was changing in the ’70s, it changed in the ’80s, it changed in the ’90s. Things change with technology,” said Kapranos. “Like, you know, if you listen to a record from 1982, it sounds different from a record from five years before that because, I don’t know, there was lexicon reverb suddenly available, this kind of thing. And so, yes, things happen, things are different.”
He elaborated on the changes. “You get a lot less money now from making music, but one thing that I find most interesting is that… The constants, the things that are the same, which is the desire to make music, the desire to play it, the desire to record it, and the desire to watch it as well, and to watch people perform and to listen to it. That hasn’t changed. It doesn’t matter how much the technology evolves around about you. I think the primary human desire that we all have to express ourselves and understand what it is to be human through music, that’s constant. It’s always going to be there.”
Touring all over the globe has also been a constant in Franz Ferdinand’s career. Kapranos said he’s made friends in all kinds of places, and also discovered that people dance differently in different countries!
“People sway more in the United States. They do a more fluid kind of gyration sort of thing. Whereas in the UK, they tend to just jump up and down. Especially Glasgow! There’s a very famous venue in Glasgow called the Barrowlands Ballroom and it has a sprung dance floor. When it kicks off, it goes crazy! All the pint glasses go in the air, the place is covered, and yeah, you just see the audience levitating. It’s a pretty good buzz. But I do like a nice sway as well.”
Kapranos is also a big fan of music radio.
“It’s just the idea of a sense of community, but also a sense of curation. That was always a big thing for me when I was a kid. And I grew up with things like (BBC Radio DJs) John Peel and Steve Lamacq…like being introduced to music by somebody whose opinion you trust. I think that’s something that an algorithm can’t do.”
It’s that trusted recommendation that Kapranos looks to for his own music discovery, but he’s also a big fan of literally stumbling upon something you didn’t expect. “Sometimes you’ll be at a festival and, if you’ve got time, it’s good to kind of check out things, especially things that you don’t know that you’ve not seen before.” That’s how he came across the band he introduced to us on WNXP – Indochine.
“We played a festival in Switzerland a few years ago, and there was this band headlining called Indochine. And I’d never heard of it. I’d maybe heard the name before, but didn’t know anything about it. I thought, this band’s headlining the festival. They’re obviously like a big deal in the French-speaking world. I’ll go and check them out. And they were great!”
“You know when you discover a band, it’s like, these songs are total bangers. This is like a huge song. Like, tens of thousands of people in this field going crazy for this song and I don’t know this, is crazy! And so I went back and listened to a lot of their music.”
“They started off late ’70s, early ’80s in France. They kind of started off in a maybe more New Wave-y, electronic kind of way and then became more industrial in the early 2000s or so. And so their sound evolved, but still, very much a creative force, which is great to see. But the song that I chose today is from 1983, off their second album, The Yellow Peril. And it’s a song called “Miss Paramount.” The song sings about the imagery of going to see a horror movie in the theatre. So it’s a little bit connected to some of the imagery of (Franz Ferdinand song) “The Dark Of The Matinee” in a weird sort of way, like about going to the cinema and sort of like escaping like that. And it’s just a very catchy banger!”
