Franz Ferdinand: The Human Fear track-by-track

On their latest album, The Human Fear, Scottish titans of the indie-art-pop scene Franz Ferdinand embark on a new chapter. It's the first FF album to feature drummer Audrey Tait and guitarist Dino Bardot, and the first to involve keys-man Julian Corrie on songwriting and creative duties alongside original members Alex Kapranos and Bob Hardy. A true return to form, The Human Fear sees the band embracing their identity more than ever before; bassist Bob Hardy talks us through the new record track by track.

Audacious

The first single from the album. What I take from the lyrics of this song is the idea that when everything seems to be falling apart around you, the most audacious thing you can do is just keep going. Musically, we wanted the song to keep building as if through a series of reveals, becoming grander as it progressed. The intro is the actual demo that Alex recorded and the ‘here we go with riff one’ bit is him making a voice note on his phone to send to me with ideas for some opening riffs. When the chorus comes in the song goes wide, and the full band appears for the first time.

Everydaydreamer

For me this song was key in unlocking the approach we made towards arranging the songs on this record, and became a signpost for the direction that other songs, such as Audacious, could take. Alex arrived at rehearsals with the song and structure worked out but it sounded very different, a much more straight ahead guitar song.

We set ourselves the goal with this record of completely embracing our identity as Franz Ferdinand and a key part of that, from our point of view, is that songs need to groove. When this final arrangement arrived it was genuinely the most exciting moment of the writing and arrangement sessions for me; the song had suddenly come to life and it made me very excited for the rest of the album writing sessions.

The Doctor

This punchy song deals with Alex’s experiences of being hospitalised with asthma as a child and his reluctance to leave once he was well enough. We’ve been playing this in the live set for a few months now and it’s been a lot of fun. Cramming that much energy into a song that’s less than two and a half minutes long can be quite exhilarating.

Hooked

For a long time this song didn’t have any lyrics. It was based around a guitar riff that Alex had written while plugged into a synthesiser. My way into music has always been through lyrics, ever since I was a child when I would listen to my dad’s Leonard Cohen albums while following along with the words on the inlay. So it wasn’t until the lyrics were written that the song really came to life for me, and they were the last lyrics that Alex wrote for the album.

They contain the line, 'I’ve got the human fear', which we ended up taking as the album title. It felt like a good title as looking back retrospectively at the songs they could be seen through a lens of overcoming various fears, and overcoming fear is an essential part of being alive; all the best things lie on the other side of fear.

Build It Up

This is the first song that Alex and Julian wrote together after Julian joined the band. It wasn’t ready to go onto Always Ascending, our 2018 album, but one of the unexpected benefits of the extended break we had to take from band activity during the pandemic was that songs like this had time to breathe and we could come back to them with fresh perspective.

Night or Day

This was another song that had arrived during the writing sessions for Always Ascending but was never quite in a place that we were happy with. When we first met Julian, with the idea that he might join the band, he came down to our studio so we could play him demos of what we’d been up to. This song, as it stood then, was the first thing we played him.

After he’d heard it we said, "Right, shall we have a go at playing it?” Our jaws dropped to the floor when he sat down at the piano and he played it note perfect from start to finish after only one listen of the demo. It became a bit of a no-brainer at that point that we should ask him to join the band.

We shot the video for this song with a Scottish director called Rianne White in our studio, the very same place where we recorded this final version and where Julian had passed his ‘audition’ several years earlier.

Tell Me I Should Stay

This song was written over the lockdown period. Julian’s piano intro makes for a nice break and change of pace on the album and the layering of Audrey’s drums really drives the song forward once it gets going.

We’ve never been scared of introducing drama into Franz Ferdinand songs and this song brings some of the quieter moments on the album as well as some of the more, swelling, driven moments.

Cats

This was written during the pandemic lockdowns and I think the sense of pent-up energy is palpable. Readers might not know but there’s a very famous musical by a man called Andrew Lloyd Webber also called Cats which the song isn’t inspired by at all.

Black Eyelashes

I mentioned earlier that we decided to actively embrace our identity as Franz Ferdinand while making this record. This song sees Alex doing this quite overtly, regarding his Greek identity and heritage. Written on a trip to Athens, it deals with the idea that as a child of an immigrant returning to his father’s homeland he feels simultaneously Greek and not Greek.

Musically it has direct influences from Greek rembetiko, which have crept into other songs in the past, 40’ from our first album for example, but never as overtly as this. It’s also the first time a bouzouki has appeared on a Franz Ferdinand song.

Bar Lonely

I’d arrived at Alex’s house one winter afternoon to find him at the piano writing this song, inspired by a tiny bar in the Golden-Gai area of Shinjuku, Tokyo, called Bar Lonely. We’d visited it a few months earlier while on tour and had a great night singing Beatles songs with the owner, who is a Beatles obsessive like Alex and myself. He had the first verse and chorus, and we worked on the rest of the verses together.

It became a song about that thing that sometimes happens at the end of relationships when neither party particularly wants to face up to the task of actually ending it, so they end up leading separate lives, staying out late, avoiding each other.

I’m delighted that we managed to put in a reference to the theme song of the 1980s US sitcom Cheers, about a bunch of alcoholics in Boston, which contains the line, 'Sometimes you want to go where everybody knows your name, and they’re always glad you came'. For Bar Lonely we were imagining a bar where you could go that would be the opposite of this, a place to be alone with your troubles, so we inverted the lines and made it, 'Where can you go where no one knows your name, where no one’s glad you came'.

The Birds

The album closer and a song about forgiveness and about the joy of anonymity within the pack. I have very fond memories of the day we recorded this; the groove is hypnotic and Alex and Dino’s guitar work fierce. To my ears this song doesn’t sound like anything else we’ve recorded as Franz Ferdinand, whilst simultaneously being instantly recognisable as Franz Ferdinand. I find this very satisfying.

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The Human Fear is out now via Domino Records

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