DominoFranz Ferdinand‘s new album Always Ascending arrives today –it’s the Scottish band’s first release without founding guitarist Nick McCarthy. But as frontman Alex Kapranos tells ABC Radio, the album and its title track reflects the state of the band in 2018.
“The course of the song [‘Always Ascending’], the way it goes, you kind of set the scene with one world, and then make a transition to a completely different universe,” Kapranos says. “It feels you’re taken from one place to another. I guess that’s what we’re doing with the band and the whole new album.”
“We’ve gone from a previous decade to a new decade, ascended from one to the other,” he continues. “So it seems like a pretty good metaphor for what we wanted to do.”
Always Ascending also comments on the state of the U.S. in 2018 with songs boasting very American images: “Lois Lane,” “The Academy Award” and “Huck and Jim.”
On “Huck and Jim,” which refers to the characters from the Mark Twain novel Adventures of Huckleberry Finn, Kapranos sings about the NHS, the U.K.’s publicly funded health care system.
“The NHS is the health care that saved my life personally, but is what everybody deserves,” Kapranos says. “You should have your health taken care of no matter what your personal financial circumstances are. That’s what you do if you’re part of a civilization.”
“The Academy Award,” meanwhile, seems like it could be about Hollywood in the post-Harvey Weinstein era, but was actually written before those allegations came to light.
“It is talking about the age that we live in, which is one of having movie cameras in our pockets all the time,” Kapranos says. “And the way we perform and present a performance of a good time to the outside world, rather than living a good time.”
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