Sometimes it’s the little details which are important in making a record.

“The studio we chose only had one sofa in the mixing room,” says Franz Ferdinand drummer Paul Thomson. “It meant it was very uncomfortable and simple. We didn’t want to sit in the studio for a year which is what we did with the last record.”

Instead Franz Ferdinand’s fourth album Right Thoughts, Right Words, Right Action was born from a series of sessions spread out over the past three years.

Thomson rejects the idea the band had split after recording and touring third album Tonight in 2009.

“We just weren’t making music for a while,” he says. “We toured for 18 months after the record came out. After that you feel like you’re stuck in a lift with the same three people.

“You have to go home and live a normal life in order to get some good life experience to write songs about something other than the artificial experience that is touring. Nobody wants to listen to that!

“It’s frustrating – we fell into some clichéd behavioural patterns that countless bands have done since the 1970s – we weren’t interested in following that path.”

When it came to recording Right Thoughts... there was a deliberate desire by Thomson, singer and guitarist Alex Kapranos, guitarist Nick McCarthy and bassist Bob Hardy to move away from the shortcomings of its predecessor.

“We wanted to try something differently so we didn’t fall into the same traps,” says Thomson, adding he feels Tonight is still a good record.

“It’s common for artists and musicians to focus on the last record in a negative sense and want to improve on it.”

Tonight had been characterised by its long gestation process, as the band built their own studio and learned how it worked.

Much of it began with rhythm tracks “because we hadn’t really written any songs” according to Thomson.

“We were enjoying the process of building things. A lot of making Tonight was a learning process, and that informed the record.

“Making this last record we spent most of the time in the rehearsal room learning how to play the songs. We tried to write a bunch of songs, learn how to play them, record them and then spend some time apart from it.”

He sees the breaks from the creative process as extremely important.

“Somebody was talking recently about what some writers do when they want to have an idea,” he says.

“They sort and gather all their source material and inspiration into one place, then go off to do some menial task like painting a wall. It’s when you’re doing that the ideas come to you. It’s why we needed that time at home. The ideas for songs never come when you’re on the road.”

The resulting album has received favourable comparisons to the Scots’ self-titled debut – something Thomson puts down to a desire to make something “succinct, punchy and direct”.

“There were a lot of weird songs that didn’t make the cut,” he says. “It has influenced how people have perceived the record – it could have turned out very differently if we had chosen ten other songs!”

He admits he would love to release the remainder of the sessions on a format he particularly treasures – the 10in vinyl record.

“A lot of my favourite albums, like Slates by The Fall, are on 10in vinyl,” he says. “I used to be in a band called Yummy Fur, and our first release was on 10in vinyl.

“It’s a format that doesn’t fit into any record collection – the 10in records tend to go to the front of the box. I like that awkwardness of doing a 10in, but I’ll have to ask the rest of the band first...”

Now he’s looking forward to playing live again.

“When we started Franz Ferdinand we had never done a proper tour before,” he says, talking of how the band built up an impressive live pedigree in their early years, moving from support slots to selling out the Alexandra Palace in just two years.

“We wanted to do as many shows as we could, because the alternative was being at home and being unemployed – I’d done eight years of that.

“It got to the point for the sake of our mental health and the band we should stop doing shows and focus on writing or our own things.

“I’m looking forward to playing again – we’ve been having ideas about the set design and costumes.

“All the designing stage sets and record sleeves comes from us. If we didn’t do it ourselves somebody else would and we wouldn’t like it so much.

“Me and Alex came up with all the text and imagery on the last album. I cut it all out by hand using a scalpel over a couple of weeks – it was just as much fun as making the music!”

Support from Eagulls.