You know an album is being tightly safe-guarded against piracy when it comes with a skull-and-crossbones stuck to the front:

Still, the advantage of hearing Franz Ferdinand's third album so far ahead of release (it comes out January 26), is that it means we can scotch a few rumours.

On first listen 'Tonight: Franz Ferdinand' is clearly not the high-NRG synth-pop album some predicted upon hearing the band were working with Girls Aloud producer Brian Higgins (in fact Franz confessed recently that those sessions were a washout).

Neither is it the afrobeat jamboree suggested by their Kano-augmented run-through of 'Can't You Let Me Stay Tonight' at Africa Exprez back in March (the song has made it on to the album, but it's now called 'Send Him Away', and the 'world music' influence is minimal).

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If the album is in thrall to any genre, in fact, it's disco. Opening track 'Ulysses' finds Alex Kapranos howling "Come on let's get high!" over an abrasive analogue synth riff, while 'Live Alone' has a thrumming Giorgio Moroder feel. Both tracks make good on Kapranos' vow that this album would be "music of the night… for the chemical surge in your bloodstream".

'Lucid Dreams' is the real curveball, though. Whereas the version released on Itunes earlier this year was angular Franz-by-numbers, here the song becomes an amorphous 8-minute epic that slowly coalesces into a hefty slab of brutal minimalist techno. It's properly mental.

More confusingly still, 'Katherine Kiss Me', the song they debuted at Glastonbury 2008, has been renamed 'No You Girls', while the album ends with an entirely different song called 'Katherine Kiss Me', this one an acoustic lullaby.

In fact, pretty much the only song that does sound like any version previously heard is the uptempo, Blondie-like 'Bite Hard'. Here's how it sounded in Cardiff back in June:

Ditto 'What She Came For, which clearly hasn't been tinkered with much since it was first aired over the summer:

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