FFS

The demo for 'Piss Off' sat in a drawer for a decade before this actually happened. It wasn’t some boardroom synergy move or a label executive’s fever dream. Alex Kapranos bumped into the Mael brothers in San Francisco while looking for a dentist, and suddenly the mid-2000s post-punk revival was staring down the barrel of seventy-something years of art-pop history. They didn't just share a bill; they smashed two distinct DNA strands together in a room with John Congleton and realized the sarcasm levels were perfectly matched. Most supergroups are a polite compromise where everyone loses their edge. This was the opposite. You have the Franz Ferdinand rhythm section—hard, danceable, precise—acting as the engine for Ron Mael’s Vaudeville-on-acid keyboard lines. It’s a record about the anxiety of collaboration, literally titled with a song called 'Collaborations Don’t Work,' which is the most Sparks thing you could possibly do while collaborating. It’s dense, it’s theatrical, and it’s arguably the most vital either camp had sounded in years because they were too busy trying to out-smart-ass each other to get lazy.

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