Following swiftly on from their debut, it’s easy to think that Franz Ferdinand are striking whilst the iron is hot, rushing a new album in the law of diminishing returns. Not for them, the difficult second album.

“You Could Have It So Much Better” seems to fall effortlessly from the same pot of gold as their debut. It isn’t a case of the Emporer's new clothes, but of a new regime. Hopefully kicking out the imposters and the other talentless drip charlatans with their pathetic inner demons, drug implants, and talent transplants, Der Franz take the angular artrock of postpunk and make it sound very now (as well as very Next Year) in a way that probably won’t date.

Chock full of hits (even the songs that won’t be hits sound like hits), from the pounding “Do You Want To?” to the closing “The Outsiders”,  Franz tap into classic imagery and reset it in a new frame. Lyrics are both specifically personal and ambigiously vague. A sound that is both idiosyncratically unique and familiar enough to seem familiar to children of all ages, “You Could Have It So Much Better” reminds me of nothing as much as U2’s “October.” – the sound of potential becoming flesh.

The sound of a band that is beginning to scratch the surface of its ambition, exploring a new world whilst remaining recognisable by its trademarks, and a band that will be absolutely stadium fillingly pantwettingly huge in five years time. Songs on here sound like old favourites the first time you hear them, so swamped in the air of familiarity and memorable melodies that “You Could….” sounds like another Greatest Hits album.

And the feeling I get is that they haven’t written their first stadium anthem yet. Their first absolute, bona-fide, Live-Forever style classic that will outlive any and all trends and the trappings of the age. “You Could Have It So Much Better” … is practically a taunt to the competition – why settle for less, when you can have this?

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