This Fffire

"This Fffire" runs at you from the first beat without apology, all angular post-punk guitars and Alex Kapranos's voice doing something between speaking and singing at the exact decibel level of barely-contained excitement. The production is obsessively tight: every element locked into a groove that wants to make you move while the lyrics simultaneously ask you to consider the violence lurking beneath the surface of youthful energy. Franz Ferdinand's great trick was always making dance music that thought about itself — songs self-aware enough to examine the pleasure they provide even as they're providing it. Culturally the track belongs to the early-2000s Glasgow art school scene that produced some of the decade's most formally interesting pop music, heavily indebted to post-punk's political seriousness while fully committed to the physical pleasure of a good riff. The song never resolves its central tension between joy and menace — it simply ends, leaving you wondering whether what you just experienced was euphoria or aggression, which is precisely the point. Best at high volume in a room with other people, the kind of track that generates spontaneous movement before you've consciously decided to dance.