Usually this is a conversation that revolves around bands like The Strokes and The White Stripes but a counterargument can be made that no two groups are more important to rock in the early 2000s than The Killers and Franz Ferdinand. In 2004 Franz Ferdinand released their self-titled debut album which launched not only their own careers but helped propel guitar driven music right back into the cultural spotlight again. Let’s clarify this picture a little with context. They’re both poised for a comeback of sorts, both acts responding to very similar realities of past and present. They make very different kinds of music but both share a similar history and, it would appear, a similar future. It’s certainly a nice coincidence that both these bands just happen to release new material in such a short span of each other (“Always Ascending” for Franz Ferdinand, “Little Dark Age” for MGMT) but this circumstance only highlights further the unique yet shared platform on which both these groups stand. Such narratives are timeless and not purely just of this moment but few acts better represent the travails of what it means to be an ‘indie’ band over the last decade or so than these two. And like all things indie rock this is also a story of decline, of an extreme high and uncertain lows. They were the years of Franz Ferdinand and MGMT, years in which their cultural grip has never been more tight or more apparent.įranz Ferdinand and MGMT represent two chapters in indie rock’s evolution both sonically and as a cultural force. Those years for me were the mid to late 2000s. These artists best capture a certain sound that was en vogue at some precise moment, a moment that becomes firmly implanted in the sensibility of those at an impressionable moment in their development. Conversely, a lot of music that we have a deeply personal relationship with is not so iconic and much more relevant to a specific period of time. In the world of music, these figures come in the form of titans like The Beatles and Bob Dylan, artists whose influence is deeply integrated into much of cultural life since. Some of these artists are perennial features of most people’s lives, universally appreciated as integral to their respective canon and are therefore inescapable and essential. All a three-year-old knows is ‘This is fun to dance around to’ and ‘I like the tune.’ That’s what music should be - that’s the essence.My youth, like anyone else’s, is a story in which certain artists are inseparable from the telling of that story. A three-year-old doesn’t intellectualize music, doesn’t hear it within any social contexts, and has no idea what’s cool and what’s not cool. That’s the best indication that we’ve done something right. “A friend of mine said that he’d been playing our album and his three-year-old daughter was dancing around the room, singing along, making up her own words, jumping around and stuff. You dance and you feel the passion, and then you can sort through the grander ideas which the music suggests. “To me, pop music is music that moves you without engaging the brain,” Kapranos explains, “and then allows you to engage the brain afterwards. charts - served to validate the band’s vision of itself as a pop group in the tradition of such leftfield acts as the Smiths and New Order, bringing adventurous ideas and challenging concepts to a mainstream audience through the undeniable power of catchy tunes. Their rapid rise at home - both “Take Me Out” and Franz Ferdinand crashed onto the upper reaches of the U.K. It makes sense that an Internet-based community would appeal to Franz Ferdinand, who adopted a populist stance from the start by articulating their mission as creating “music for girls to dance to.” And while many American bands would recoil at the idea of being viewed as a pop band, Franz Ferdinand are not only proud of the label, they’re determined to change people’s minds about the meaning of the term. People come up to me and say, ‘I downloaded your album, and I can’t wait to go out and buy it.'” “I’m not going to criticize somebody for loving music. “Downloading is a great way to find out about music,” he says. Kapranos credits the band’s rising popularity outside of its home country to the power of the Internet, which he views as a boon to music, as opposed to a profit-draining menace.

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