Franz Ferdinand have released a video to accompany the title track of their upcoming album Always Ascending. You can watch it above. Their fifth LP follows 2013’s Right Thoughts, Right Words, Right Action and it’s set for release on Feb. 9, 2018.

“We wanted to take the sounds that are available to us now and make the sound that you haven’t heard before – the sound of the future,” frontman Alex Kapranos recently told NME. “When you’re recording in 2017 you need to be looking ahead to the next thing. What haven’t people even heard in 2018? In terms of ‘naturalistic’, it’s not retrogressive but it’s about trying to make something that feels like it’s being played by humans. It’s very tempting in the studio to digitally tidy everything up – Photoshopping your music. Everything was played and nothing is programmed. It still has to be raw and have that rock n’ roll side to it.”

Asked about lyrical concepts, he replied, “There might be a theme, but I haven’t discovered it yet. I was responding to the things around us. The song ‘Always Ascending’ was inspired by a historic event that happened to some people and they ended up literally ascending and leaving the Earth. I don’t want to say too much about it now."

“We would write and create characters the way that you would if you were a short story writer," he continued. "You’d have color and backstory, that would only be hinted at in the song. That was a cool way to do it. We wanted characters that were convincing and had emotional depth to them. In stories and movies, no one questions that emotional depth, but when you’re writing a rock n’ roll song, there’s always this presumption that they have to always be from personal experience to have veritas. We wanted to buck that and create characters that were even more believable and vivid than real life experience can be.”

Franz Ferdinand, ’Always Ascending' Track Listing

"Always Ascending"
"Lazy Boy"
"Paper Cages"
"Finally"
"The Academy Award"
"Lois Lane"
"Huck and Jim"
"Glimpse of Love"
"Feel the Love Go"
"Slow Don’t Kill Me Slow"

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