The members of the Scottish band Franz Ferdinand. From left: Paul Thomson, Bob Hardy, Alex Kapranos and Nick McCarthy. (Domino/Sony BMG)

Everything you need to know about Tonight: Franz Ferdinand you can tell from its cover. The third album by the Scottish rock group features a creepy black-and-white snapshot of what appears to be a crime scene on a grotty street corner. All four band members are there, clad in slick suits that make them look like weedy gangsters. Flanked by drummer Paul Thomson and guitarist Nick McCarthy bassist Bob Hardy lies sprawled on the curb, the victim of some gruesome attack. Frontman Alex Kapranos squints at the camera, his hands up — he's either blinded by the light, warding off an unseen villain or both.

'I try to live as ordinary a life as possible offstage. I have no interest in acting like I’m an arrogant rock star.'

-- Alex Kapranos

The shot evokes the bloody vignettes of early 20th-century photographer Weegee, who documented the aftermath of actual crimes, but also staged such ominous tableaux. There's something about the cover of Tonight: Franz Ferdinand that works in perfect harmony with the music. The album is a slinky collection of primal beats, seedy garage rock guitars and groggy snapshots of late-night trysts, punctuated by the occasional heartfelt confession.

Assigning that much credence to a band's album visuals would seem like a stretch, but Franz Ferdinand's art-school pedigree suggests that every detail of their packaging is calculated.

Kapranos cites Weegee as a starting point, but claims New York artist Cindy Sherman was also a source of inspiration. Sherman found fame in the late '70s through a series of self-portraits in which she portrayed B-movie-type characters from imaginary films.

"So much of the writing and sound of this record came from improvisation, and that reminded me of [Sherman's] Untitled Film Stills," Kapranos explains in a recent phone interview from London. "I also loved the idea of leaving space for the viewer to interpret who the characters were and where they were. We took the principle of open-endedness from the mood of the record and applied it to the setting."

According to Kapranos, the graphic style of Franz Ferdinand's first two records — their self-titled 2004 debut and You Could Have It So Much Better (2005) — reflected their sound. Inspired by Russian constructivist art, both the music and the graphic design were "all geometry and clean, simple lines," he says. With their latest release, the foursome felt drawn to more representational work, stuff based on story and character.

(Domino/Sony BMG)

"I think that, even as a performer, there's something within you that you draw out onstage or in the studio that's not there in everyday life," Kapranos offers. "I'd read interviews with Sherman where she talked about how she'd dress up in these costumes and walk around New York City at the time, and it was if she suddenly wasn't herself. It felt analogous to how, lyrically, I wanted to create characters to occupy in the space of a song, ones at odds with my regular self. For me, it's nice to create characters who are unsavoury, like the creepy stalker in [the Tonight track] Turn It On."

Five years ago, Franz Ferdinand snagged BRIT awards for best British group and best British rock act, and the 2004 Mercury Prize. Early singles like Take Me Out, a swaggering rallying cry for a dance-floor knockout, and The Dark of the Matinée, a sultry tune about a movie-theatre gropefest, weren't just top-10 chart hits — they became a template for a slew of guitar bands that dominated charts in the early aughts.

Franz Ferdinand's debut was named Album of the Year by iconic UK music rag NME, a publication that likes its rock darlings raucous and rowdy. But for folks who salivate over the messy antics of rock stars, Franz Ferdinand have been a huge disappointment. The Glaswegian quartet took its early success in stride and kept living the quiet lives of middle-class aesthetes. Franz Ferdinand didn't even take the bait when Oasis hooligan Liam Gallagher tried to goad them into a tabloid rivalry after likening Kapranos to fey novelty act Right Said Fred (I'm Too Sexy).

Franz Ferdinand's most outrageous stunt was probably Kapranos's decision to sign on as a roving food critic for the Guardian newspaper. During the band's 2005 tour, Kapranos sent weekly reports from the field, documenting his culinary adventures as he traveled everywhere from Singapore to Toronto. While peers in more conventional rock groups were off shotgunning beers and downing Denny's on the road, the Franz frontman indulged in such esoteric comestibles as Portuguese Azeitao cheese and a Parisian salad made mostly of gizzards.

It was a strikingly bourgeois undertaking for a so-called rock star, but the real shocker? Kapranos was good at it. (His columns have since been published in an illustrated collection called Sound Bites: Eating on Tour with Franz Ferdinand.) The experience had a profound effect on his lyrics. Kapranos's more imagistic writing adds a new level of depth to the band's compositions.

Kapranos also cites Iris Murdoch's 1961 novel A Severed Head — about a "ménage a cinq or six" — as a key literary inspiration for the songs on Tonight. The strutting disco track No You Girls and the wistful acoustic album closer Katherine Kiss Me are two different recollections of the same fleeting alleyway tryst; elsewhere, Kapranos tackles such non-rock 'n' roll subject matter as the banality of cohabitation and spirituality. Bite Hard, he has said, is about how hard it is to let go of belief: "Even if you don't have organized religion in your life, something within us still has a desire for this Charlton Heston-like figure."

Lead singer and guitarist Alex Kapranos, right, of Franz Ferdinand in concert. (Domino/Sony BMG)

"One thing I tried [on Tonight] was to go with a theme and write long — not prose, but half-prose, which had elements of rhythm and rhyme but wasn't formally structured. And then I'd take that and apply it to the melody. I wasn't trying to write in a way that was constricted by the metre of the music.

"Another thing I hadn't tried before was involving the other [band members]. At one point, I got everyone together in a room, and we all had a time limit to fill pages with thoughts about, say, 'What did you eat last week?'"

Though the songs on Tonight seem more autobiographical than the bulk of Franz Ferdinand's oeuvre, Kapranos and co. have also accomplished a neat trick: by creating characters and fusing several different perspectives, the band manages to obfuscate the particulars of the members' personal lives.

"There's no trickery involved per se," laughs Kapranos. "But I try to live as ordinary a life as possible offstage. I have no interest in acting like I'm an arrogant rock star. And for me, the only way to accomplish that is not talking about anything to do with personal relationships. That's the difference between being a little well known because of the music you make and being a celebrity. I have no interest in the showbiz confessional."

Tonight is in stores now.

Sarah Liss writes about the arts for CBCNews.ca.