At Work: Friko
photo: Pooneh Ghana
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Where we’ve been, Where we go from here, the stunning debut LP from artsy Chicago indie-rockers Friko, captures the rare emotional middle ground between “angst, melancholy, hopefulness and hopelessness.”
As singer/guitarist Niko Kapetan—who formed the band in 2019, after one unfruitful year studying music at Columbia College—says, “I dropped out, took up a warehouse job and committed to music.”
And that sense of youthful drama—of wanting something bigger for yourself at a pivotal point—radiates throughout the album, a more experimental and expansive follow-up to their 2022 EP, Whenever Forever.
But the record—also guided by dynamic drummer Bailey Minzenberger and former bassist Luke Stamos—applies that ambition to myriad sounds, drawing on shoegaze, power-pop, punk and even chamber-pop. Highlights include the choppy, emo-prog eruption of “Chemical,” the swooningly sad sing-along lyrics to “Get Numb to It!” and the quiet-loud catharsis of “Crashing Through,” which is driven by Kapetan’s distorted, bent-note guitars and Minzenberger’s intricate drumming.
“I was taking parts of classical songs and making things out of them,” Kapetan says of the latter tune. “That’s part of a Ravel piece reversed. I played that riff, and I was like, ‘How are we gonna do this as a band?’ Then I started playing it on guitar.”
The album’s centerpiece, “For Ella,” might be its least rock-centric moment—a weepy, piano-and-strings love song sparked after Kapetan visited a Wisconsin graveyard. “I thought I was going to make a whole concept record about this Ella deal,” he says. “But it was like, ‘That’s not gonna happen, so I’ll just make this one song about that.’ I liked it because it reminded me of ‘Waltz #1’ by Elliott Smith, and I kept going with that feeling.”
Kapetan has a similar mindset about Friko—through the angsty process of making Where we’ve been, he’s figured out what the band is supposed to be. “It all came together, whereas before, I didn’t know who I was or what the band was or what kind of songs we were doing or what we meant,” he says. “Now, we know the feeling we want to convey with these songs.
“It’s this perfect feeling where you’re like, ‘I have something to say,’” he adds, describing their moment. “It doesn’t come that often, and when it does, it’s just about feeling deeply.”
