Franz Ferdinand’s art school sensibility and foundational love of grand riffs and choruses are on maximum display on the Glasgow band’s sixth full-length, The Human Fear. The splendid glamour of its 11 tracks reflects the album’s positive sentiments. Though the songs’ narrators confront fear in its various forms, rather than instilling fear, the album is about acknowledging it, accepting it, and ultimately overcoming it. To do so is a a life-affirming feat, especially if one manages to harness fear as motivation to accomplish something great, be it finding love or making art. “Give me strength to overcome / Give me strength, I’m not gonna run,” singer-guitarist Alex Kapranos vows on “Build It Up.” This determined vitality courses through The Human Fear.

The Human Fear boasts some of Franz Ferdinand’s most relentlessly catchy, chorus-heavy dance rock songs, like charged New Wave thumper “The Doctor,” which features barbed, wiry guitars and pointy, shimmering keys. Powered by electric drum pads and bold, stuttering keys, “Hooked” is a pure throwback banger. “I got the human fear / That’s all right,” Kapranos sings before looking outward: “Everybody here got the human fear / But that’s all right,” he continues. The ornate “Audacious” carries a theatrical flare that calls to mind Queen or one-time FFS collaborators Sparks. “Audacious” is a logical choice for a first single, as audaciousness is the keyword of The Human Fear, the necessary quality one needs in order to confront and overcome fear, the quality artists need to challenge the boundaries of genres in order to create something new, the way like Kapranos’ formative favourites the Specials and Madness did. And commencing with raw piano that conjures images of opaque ivory curtains and candles flapping and flickering near an open window, then bursting into theatrical rock, “Tell Me I Should Stay” is one of Franz Ferdinand’s most finely arranged songs.
 
There’s also a theme of fear of commitment and losing independence, but on the sprinting “Bar Lonely,” which references a bar in Tokyo’s Golden Gai district, a network of six alleyways crammed with upwards of 200 bars, the narrator’s independence, or rather, wandering, unmoored anonymity, drives him to unravel into a manic, anxious panic. “Where can you go / Where no one knows your name / Where no one’s glad that you came?” he wonders. “You know the owner, and he knows which shot is the usual for you / The memories he will remove from you.” The song contains a coiled tension between chasing comfort and familiarity in a crowded destination, and ultimately paradoxically drinking until he loses sense of himself. But despite this bar serving as a reminder of his harsh reality, he still holds onto it as the place where he’ll find what he’s looking for: “Life is never going to be easy / But if you’re living with me, we’re going to live it up night or day.”
 
Another highlight of The Human Fear is “Black Eyelashes,” possibly Kapranos’ most overtly personal song to date. Though Kapranos was born in England and raised in Scotland, his father is Greek. The song finds Kapranos exploring his Greek identity, particularly the fact that to people in Greece, he’s never quite Greek enough, be it his physical mannerisms, speech patterns, light hair, or blue eyes.

The strength of The Human Fear’s songs is due in part to Franz Ferdinand’s new creative approach. This time around, they prepared a songbook before knocking out the songs as quickly as possible in the studio. Identifying the most important of songwriting, they arrived at an obvious answer: the most important factor is strong songwriting, not what textures they want to explore or play with. They say don’t fix what isn’t broken, but with this approach, Franz Ferdinand prove that that accepted truism doesn’t always hold, another life-affirming victory when it comes to pushing creative boundaries.

Pre-order The Human Fear by Franz Ferdinand HERE