The second Franz Ferdinand album will sound nothing like you would expect, says the man who knows best – the record’s producer.
Leftfield hip-hop producer Dan ‘The Automator’ Nakamura has given NME.COM the inside track on the album, work on which is already well in progress.
He said: “Hearing some of the new demos they’ve been working on, they’re more musically diverse than what you might hear from listening to the [first] album. They sound like Franz Ferdinand. They’re a band that are fairly comfortable with being a four-piece rock band or being a little bit more electronic. Their influences are very wide and I think they can adapt to that while maintaining the sound, I think that’s what’s cool about it.”
Dan has already worked on two versions of forthcoming Franz Ferdinand single ‘Can’t Stop Feeling’ as well as a track for his own album with his collaborative project Handsome Boy Modelling
School. Alex Kapranos contributes vocals to ‘The World’s Gone Mad’, the first single to be taken from the album ‘White Boys’, out November 8. Also appearing on the album are Deftonesfrontman Chino Moreno, Linkin Park’s Mike Shinoda, [a][/a] and Cat Power.
Sessions went so well that a handshake agreement now exists between the two parties that when work on the follow-up starts in earnest next year, Nakamura will be at the helm. He is no stranger to ‘dancing up’ indie stars, having been Damon Albarn’s chief collaborator on the Gorillaz project.
He said: “Ultimately what I would bring to a record like that is just a point of view, I think technically we all know what we’re doing. What is more interesting is that there’s a certain mutual understanding of music that we can bounce ideas off of each other and cull from that and make something new. It seems like it’s a good mix and we’ve tried some things and it works well and hopefully we can continue to further that.”
Meanwhile, Alex Kapranos has told NME that the band are planning to wrap up the first album campaign with a massive thank-you show in Glasgow in time for Christmas. . “We’re going to see Santa Claus at John Lewis’. He’s going to play for us,” Kapranos joked. “We’re thinking of doing something near our home, sort of a celebratory thing around Glasgow.” The band are currently in America winding up their live commitments, due to finish on October 3 in New York, before returning to the UK for a sold-out tour, including three nights at London’s Brixton Academy.