Following his 2017 mixtape 999, Los Angeles-based hip-hop artist Juice WRLD issued his official debut full-length, Goodbye & Good Riddance (Interscope), in May 2018. The set landed at number 15 on the Billboard 200 upon release and featured melancholy, trap-based singles like "All Girls Are the Same" and the Hot 100 hit "Lucid Dreams." © Neil Z. Yeung /TiVo

Following his 2017 mixtape 999, Los Angeles-based hip-hop artist Juice WRLD issued his official debut full-length, Goodbye & Good Riddance (Interscope), in May 2018. The set landed at number 15 on the Billboard 200 upon release and featured melancholy, trap-based singles like "All Girls Are the Same" and the Hot 100 hit "Lucid Dreams." © Neil Z. Yeung /TiVo

The very name of this band is synonymous with the brutality of change (the assassination of Franz Ferdinand von Österreich-Este was the trigger for the first world war), so it only makes sense that they still have a place in 2022, in a world full of pandemics, war and climate change. Formed in Scotland in 2004, with 10 million albums sold worldwide, Alex Kapranos’ band decided it was time to release a greatest hits album featuring 18 songs, as well as two unreleased tracks: Billy Goodbye and Curious, both co-produced with Stuart Price (Dua Lipa, Madonna, Pet Shop Boys). The tracks are listed in chronological order, beginning with Darts of Pleasure and Take Me Out—their biggest hit to date. The following seven tracks all hail from their first and second album and show the band’s talent for creating feverish rock tracks with elegant and heady melodies. These are followed by Lucid Dreams, Ulysses and No You Girls from their third album, Tonight: Franz Ferdinand, in which their sound took a darker turn. The album returns to the light with tracks from Right Thoughts, Right Words, Right Action, and continues with two songs with a distinct electropop feel: Always Ascending and Glimpse of Love. This album takes the form of a setlist for an imaginary concert, and its cover is inspired by the Bauhaus style, as is often the case with Franz Ferdinand. ©Nicolas Magenham/Qobuz

"I found a new way, baby," Alex Kapranos snarls on "Ulysses," Tonight's lead single and opening track, and he's almost right. Franz Ferdinand took awhile to record this album after releasing You Could Have It So Much Better as quickly as possible after their breakthrough debut, spending a couple of years coming up with the concept of a "dirty pop" album and trying out dance and pop producers like Erol Alkan and Girls Aloud sound-shapers Xenomania before settling on Dan Carey, who has worked with everyone from CSS to Kylie Minogue. The group tried hard to make these songs a deliberate break from their previous music, and the album is nothing if not deliberate: a concept album about a debauched night out and the morning after, Tonight is more focused than You Could Have It So Much Better, and on the surface, it sounds different than what came before. The band's normally de rigueur angular post-punk guitars are dialed down in favor of beats, bass, and lots of keyboards, all of which are on display on "Ulysses," which, like You Could Have It So Much Better's "Do You Want To?," initially sounds like an odd single choice, then makes perfect sense after a few listens. Kapranos whispers like a devil on your shoulder as the band takes its time building to disco-punk euphoria. Throughout the rest of album, however, Franz Ferdinand alternates between putting their rave-ups in slightly different skins and taking some real chances with their music. With the most familiar-sounding songs at the top, Tonight's song sequencing might be the most pop thing about it: "Turn It On"'s stop-start rhythms,"Send Him Away"'s Afro-pop-tinged guitars, and "Can't Stop Feeling"'s DFA-like percussion and fuzzy synths are minor refinements on the sound the band has used since Franz Ferdinand. A few songs transcend templates, like the unrepentantly rakish swagger of "No You Girls," which boasts saucy lyrics like "kiss me where your eye won't meet me" and a cleverly twisting chorus that expresses the album's theme of smart enough to know better hedonism perfectly. "Live Alone"'s disco-fied push-pull between solitude and intimacy makes ambivalence exciting, and "Bite Hard"'s punchy drums are the sound of dancing on your conscience's grave. The band saves Tonight's most interesting songs for last: "Lucid Dreams" is oddly dark and jubilant, setting its fantasies to one of the album's boldest arrangements -- whether or not the way it trails off on a four-minute jam is successful is a matter of taste, but it's a welcome risk on an album that often feels safe despite its attempts to shake things up. Likewise, the way the acoustic closer "Katherine Kiss Me" transforms "No You Girls"' raw nighttime demands into wry daytime flirtation is so clever that it makes the rest of Tonight all the more puzzling -- it's often catchy and kinetic in the moment, yet it still feels like Franz Ferdinand has the potential to do more with their music than just slightly tweak and polish a sound they established several albums ago. © Heather Phares /TiVo