We started writing without being sure it would end up being a Franz Ferdinand record

grouped after the departure of founding member, guitarist and keyboardist Nick McCarthy, who quit the group to spend more time with his family following their 2015 FFS collaboration with US group Sparks.

Hardy recalls a frank conversation with Kapranos and drummer Paul Thomson in the Scottish countryside after McCarthy broke the news. The remaining trio considered splitting, or even reforming as a new band, he reveals, before agreeing the motivation was there to work on new music.

“We started writing without being 100% sure whether it would end up being a Franz Ferdinand record,” he says. “We were a hypothetical band at that point. We couldn’t go on stage, we couldn’t play any shows, we couldn’t play our old material.

“We turned down offers to play shows and festivals because at one point we literally weren’t really a band.”

New blood was needed and first to arrive in the new-look Franz Ferdinand was producer

Road trip: the Scots rockers will be back on stage with a world tour this year

and musician Julian Corrie, who Hardy and Co knew from his work under his Miaoux Miaoux moniker.

“The stuff we had been writing at that point was leaning to the electronic side of Franz more, and that was the world Julian came from, and so he just fitted right in smoothly and things started moving quite quickly,” says Hardy.

Corrie joined them in Scotland, where they began recording what would become their upcoming record, Always Ascending, due out next month.

Kapranos billed the album as “simultaneously futuristic and naturalistic” and Hardy explains how, although they were keen to embrace the arrival of Corrie’s fizzing synths and dancier

arrangements, there was also an awareness of retaining rawness.

“When we went into the studio, we didn’t want to start playing to a click and importing the songs onto a grid and taking all the humanity away from it,” he adds.

“Although the record occupies a dancier part of music, it’s still very human and it comes from a live band playing. You get the push and pull of a live drummer, the increases in tempo, the slowdowns ... the slight mistakes are still in there and that’s the naturalistic element coupled with electronic sounds.”

Part of that was also down to Corrie, Hardy continues. The multi-instrumentalist recorded his parts live by “replicating a robot”.