Franz Ferdinand's 2004 debut got the rock crowd dancing, and now the spiffy Scotsmen return, sounding bigger and better than before. By April Long. Photographed by Kenneth Cappello

Like their music, Franz Ferdinand’s aesthetic is finely tuned. When the group assemble for brunch this morning in a Tribeca hotel lobby, it's heavy summer outside, yet they're all wearing drainpipe trousers, long-sleeved shirts and boots.

Franz Ferdinand is one of the few bands that understand what it means to look like a band: It may sound superficial, but this attention to dress speaks volumes about where they’re coming from musically. The group’s sound–informed, as it is, by a dizzyingly diverse array of influences is as unique as their fashion sense. "In recent years there's been this terrible trend towards people's tastes lying completely within one genre," Kapranos says. "That's a bad situation for musicians, especially; if you're listening to music that's very close to your own music, then you're never going to do anything new. I think that's a big problem with a lot of contemporary American rock music. So many of those pop-punk bands sound like they just listen to each other and nothing else. It's troubling."

Franz Ferdinand’s recently released second album, You Could Have It So Much Better, may have a more evolved sound than their first, but simplicity and spontaneity were key to its production. The band recorded most of the album at Kapranos' new home just outside of Glasgow. ("The Scottish tabloids got hold of the idea that I bought a big country house," he says with a laugh, "But it's just a house. It's got four bedrooms and a room that's big enough to record in.") You Could Have It So Much Better was finished in only a few weeks; the band whittled down and rearranged songs as they worked. "We wanted to have a wider and deeper sound on this record," Thompson says, "but not bring in any instrument that wasn't played by us, because that's when you start to lose your identity."
There's little chance that the members Franz Ferdinand will ever suffer from an identity crisis.

They remain both idealistic and humble, too grounded to lose touch with the vision that got them going in the first place. Whether or not their new album beats the three million copies sold of the band's debut doesn't really matter. The foursome has already crossed over from the art-rock milieu that spawned them to inject the world at large with a much needed jolt of intelligence and style. If fans of bands like 3 Doors Down and Black Eyed Peas don't yet know that they really can have it so much better with Franz Ferdinand, well, it's their loss.