Friko
Album: Where We’ve Been, Where We Go From Here
Release Date: 2024
USA
On their full-length debut and first release for ATO Records, vocalist/guitarist Niko Kapetan and drummer Bailey Minzenberger merge elements of post-punk and chamber-pop and experimental rock, magnifying their music’s exhilarating power with a steady barrage of spirited ensemble vocals. Poetic, explosive, and sublimely raw in feeling, Where We’ve Been, Where We Go From Here brings an equally visceral intensity to brutally heavy anthems and heart-on-sleeve ballads alike, creating an immediate outlet for the most unwieldy emotions. [More on whoisfriko.com]
Lyrics: Where We've Been
Twenty years spent above this place
You could smell the iron from the room
And the train was running through the window
Carrying a pillow
So I could lay my head down onto you
Dirty drawers and an awful stench
A stomach made of stick and glue
A fortress built between the four rooms
Huddled in a dorm room
You took it out of me
And your teeth hurt more than the day before
It’s time to get another job
Four feet between a wall and window will make your wife a widow
So throw your arms around me
Now I don’t know where we go from here
I spent one year and I gave it up
A sickness that brought you to your parents
A life of only errands will make a fool out of ya
And your teeth hurt more than the day before
It’s time to get another job
Four feet between a wall and window will make your wife a widow
So throw your arms around me
The truth is hard to bare
So we’ll be waiting here ‘til sundown
Seems it only comes now when we’re staring away from it
Na na na na na na na na na
Four feet between a wall and window will make your wife a widow
So throw your arms around me
Where we’ve been, where we go from here
Take your weight and throw your arms around me
Tracklist: Where We've Been, Where We Go From Here
1. “Where We’ve Been”
2. “Crimson To Chrome”
3. “Crashing Through”
4. “For Ella”
5. “Chemical”
6. “Statues“
7. “Until I’m With You Again“
8. “Get Numb To It!“
9. “Cardinal”
We all brainstormed for a few minutes what we could do and we just came up with an idea to extend the outro one more rotation. We went back in and recorded it without discussing, and by the end we were all sobbing, and that live vocal, drum, bass, and guitar are all the take on the record. Truly that moment was the most special moment of my entire creative career this far.
Niko on making of Where We’ve Been
Congratulations on your debut album. How are you all feeling at the moment?
Just extremely excited and grateful to be able to get this music out there finally! We’ve been working on it for years so this is a huge moment for us. We also can’t wait to be on the road a bunch this year.
You often describe your music as ‘visceral‘. Will you please explain that in depth?
For us, that means “with energy and to the point”. You feel it in your whole self, and that’s what we feel when we play this music live and hope others do as well! It’s also meant to be a term for the emotion and intimacy of it as well, and how that energy combines with the more physical energy of the upbeat songs.
Friko @ The Sylvee, Madison, 09-14-24
Photo: Hanna Husakova
The whole album is so real, so poetic, so live which could have easily gone wrong with that recipe. I remember listening to Pablo Honey and feeling similar years ago: It’s tense and chaotic and maybe ‘imperfect’ but still incredible. How did you manage to stay on the bright side of this risky ground?
That’s so kind, thank you! We knew going in we wanted this record to feel like our live show both sonically and emotionally. And when doing that you’ve reallyyyy got to lean into the rawness and the messiness. But with that, you only want that raw and messy feeling when it’s a well-rehearsed band. And we’ve been playing these songs live for years so recording in the studio was just like “ok let’s turn off our minds and just play these how we’ve always played them”. I don’t think this kind of record could’ve been made if we wrote the songs and then recorded them immediately, without playing them live a bunch.
We have chosen Where We’ve Been from your album for our loop songs series. It is such a powerful opener. How did this song come about and what is the story behind it?
That was the only song on the album that I wrote pretty much all of it in one sitting. After I got the guitar line, the lyrics just started spewing out and ended up telling the story of my life from my one and only year at college, up to a few years later and all the countless dead-end jobs and toothaches in between. However, after we started playing it as a band, it really became the song that represented our friendship as a group.
When we were recording “Where We’ve Been” in the studio, our longtime friend and producer for the album, Scott Tallarida, basically told us “It’s not done”. Which of course made us very emotional and determined to “finish it” there. The song basically fizzled out before the outro rotation where we sing, “Where we’ve been, where we go from here, take your weight and throw your arms around me”. We all brainstormed for a few minutes what we could do and we just came up with an idea to extend the outro one more rotation. We went back in and recorded it without discussing, and by the end we were all sobbing, and that live vocal, drum, bass, and guitar are all the take on the record. Truly that moment was the most special moment of my entire creative career this far.
Your album feels like a live gig in a sense and Where We’ve Been is such a perfect example of that intentional live feeling which you publicly announce by the official video itself anyway. How special is it for you in terms of setting the tone of the album?
We were very intentional in choosing Where We’ve Been as the album opener because we knew we wanted to set the tone for the whole album immediately. Which is basically that there are gonna be a lot of right turns and dynamic moves. More than that though that song is so special to us, we wanted anyone who was out on the album to hear that immediately.
Reporting from your neighbor state Wisconsin, what does Chicago mean to you and your music?
Chicago is the place we grew up, and this city has always had a fantastic yet humble music history, and we definitely take pride in that. The local scene right now is just so talented and friendly, we couldn’t have asked for a better place to develop as a band.
I am really curious about your non-English favorites from around the world if you have any.
Right now my fav is Daniel Owino Misiani, an incredible Kenyan guitarist from the 70s who was said to have invented Benga music. Benga is that type of music that you put on and you immediately feel happier.
