Franz Ferdinand ready to start new album

Franz Ferdinand will start writing its third album next week, according to NME.com. Singer Alex Kapranos is currently in New York producing a band called the Cribs, but will head home to Scotland to reunite with his bandmates and get down to work. Although the band had seven or eight songs composed by the time they were done touring last year, Kapranos said, "I don't really want to rely on the old songs so much...I'd rather see what the character of the new songs is that we're going be writing. I'd like the next album to be quite new, to be quite different sounding from everything we've ever done before."

Guitarist Nick McCarthy has set up a studio in the band's hometown of Glasgow where they will begin writing and recording demos. Kapranos said, "I don't want to approach it with some kind of preconceived idea of what it should be, I want to spend as long coming up with a new sound as we can."

The new Franz Ferdinand disc will follow up 2005's You Could Have It So Much Better.

Kapranos published a book in December called Sound Bites, collecting all the food columns he's written for U.K. newspaper the Guardian.