![]() Then the pandemic hit, isolating everyone. “He didn't say it to me at the time, but he told me afterwards,” he says. ![]() But Thomson started having panic attacks. The rest of the band was in the groove and loving every minute of being on stage. When he returned, they were in the middle of some massive festival appearances in Latin America, including Corona Capital, where Kapranos says there were about 150,000 people in the crowd. The drummer had broken his hand and missed several months of touring, with the rest of the band continuing on without him. With hindsight, it was around the end of their last major tour when Kapranos knew Thomson might depart the band, Kapranos says. Yet to put a record out, it's going to take you fucking almost a year to do it.” “I could write something just now and stick it up on Spotify, and the rest of the world could hear it literally within hours. “It’s simply because of the logistics of releasing a record nowadays, which I find really frustrating, because in some ways you can get stuff out immediately,” he says. The lead-in for vinyl pressings is about eight months at the moment because of scarcity and delivery delays. They’re not anywhere close to being done, however, so that release is still at least a year down the line. Some have been tracked by the band since last fall. ![]() Kapranos says he’s written some songs and has even demoed a few. “It was a frustrating few years not being able to get together with everybody and record, and I wanted to make new music.” They were well up for it, shall we say,” he laughs. “Like any major emotional endeavor involving others, consent needs to be given. When he gave the other members an out from the band if they so chose, he didn’t feel like it was the end-and he was hoping they didn’t either. “It was a frustrating few years not being able to get together with everybody and record, and I wanted to make new music,” Kapranos says. Kapranos has stayed busy promoting Hits and the new songs, filming videos with directors Diane Martel and Andy Knowles (the latter of whom went to art school with Hardy and was a touring member of Franz Ferdinand for a while), and recording demos for a new album, which is well in the works. But just because Kapranos and company are looking back for a change doesn’t mean they aren’t also looking ahead at the next stage of the band. “Curious” is one of two new songs on Franz Ferdinand’s forthcoming retrospective album, Hits to the Head. “Being in a band is like being in a gang, and she’s a very cool gang member,” he says. ![]() She just got it like that, and the whole feel felt really fucking good.” By that point, Kapranos says, everyone got along swimmingly and knew that she was Franz Ferdinand’s new drummer. “The hi hat is going, ‘Chka-ch-ch-ch/chka-ch-ch-ch/chka-chka-chka-ch,’ which is a really difficult thing to remember and to pull off, but it makes the song flow in a way that’s really cool. When local artist Audrey Tait came in for an audition at the band’s studio, Kapranos handed her “Curious.” “It's deceptively simple, but the hi hat pattern is kind of weirdly complicated,” Kapranos explains on a video call from the studio. Because they were a Glasgow band, the drummer needed to be from that city. The others said they were excited to keep pushing forward-something Franz Ferdinand has seemingly always done-and Kapranos said that the next order of business, even before running through new song “Curious,” was to find a new drummer. “‘Do you want to keep playing music in the context of this band? Because now's the time to say yes or no.’” “‘Right, how do you feel? Are you excited about this music?’” he asked them. The morning that drummer Paul Thomson officially left Franz Ferdinand last fall, bandleader and chief songwriter Alex Kapranos addressed his remaining bandmates: co-founding bassist Bob Hardy, keyboardist Julian Corrie, and guitarist Dino Bardot (who joined the band in 2016 when original guitarist Nicholas McCarthy departed).
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