Always Ascending is out February 9. Franz Ferdinand tour the UK in February including stops in Cambridge, Brighton, Newcastle and Nottingham

The band also brought in guitarist Dino Bardot, a member of former fellow Scottish indie-rockers 1990s, and are forging a new identity as a five-piece.

After 15 years of the same line-up, dynamics are bound to change, Hardy admits.

“We’re a five-piece so it feels like a new band in many ways — it almost is,” he says.

“There’s different personalities and it means set roles we may have had before have been thrown up in the air a little bit and it becomes fluid, you know? People’s roles aren’t set in stone any more and there’s a certain freedom to it, I guess, when you forge a new identity like that.”

The arrival of Corrie, who has not toured outside of the UK before, and Bardot has also given the band’s remaining original members a reminder of their good fortune.

“It’s quite infectious because you kind of realise what an amazing thing it is to do when someone’s doing it for the first time,” Hardy says.

“It was exciting. It felt like back in the beginning, when we were putting things together for the first time.”

Preparations for their tour are well under way. The band embark on a lengthy worldwide tour starting in London on the eve of Always Ascending’s release, with the 14 UK dates sandwiched around a Saturday night homecoming show in Glasgow.

“We’re looking forward to seeing people reacting to the new songs live,” says Hardy.

“Saturday night in Glasgow is gonna be great — I always look forward to going home for a gig, but to be honest every show in the UK feels like that.

“Manchester feels like a second home — it was our first show we ever played outside of Glasgow, when we supported Interpol, and since then it’s always been crazy.”

The band will return to the Scottish city in July as headliners of the new TRNSMT festival, which launched in 2017 and takes place on Glasgow Green.

“There’s something quite special about a festival in a city,” Hardy says. “It has this weird energy because you’re already in the middle of a town and you put a festival in the middle of it and it just ramps it up.”

But first comes the record, and the bassist is philosophical about its release following a tumultuous couple of years for one of the few survivors of the noughties guitar scene. “We can make the best record we can and be as sincere and honest about it as we can but after it’s out, we have to let it go. We just let it go and it’s gone and it’s out there,” he says.