Friko’s World Inside a Song

“20 years spent above this place, you could smell the iron from the room,” Niko Kapetan hums at the opening of Where we’ve been, Where we go from here. “And the train was running through the window, carrying a pillow so I could lay my head down onto you.” His vocals galvanize saccharine guitar chords into an oblivion of noise, gang vocals and a wallpaper of distorted gibberish. It’s what I’d imagine Conor Oberst making a pre-OK Computer Radiohead song in 2023 might sound like; this is how Friko has chosen to introduce themselves to us, with phantasmic guitars and a volcanic wall of sound so arresting and mythical you’ll have to run the whole track back just as soon as it fades out. It’s one hell of a hello.

Though it’s now Kapetan and drummer Bailey Minzenberger, Friko began in 2019 as Kapetan’s band when he was in high school, as he put out a collection of 12 demos—Burnout Beautiful—that year and started gigging at local spots around the city. Kapetan and Minzenberger met in a music theory class as teenagers, but they didn’t talk—Bailey was a grade ahead of Niko, and the two ran in neighboring circles, aka they both played in bands at the same time in the same place. While Minzenberger’s dad is a jazz guitarist and they took up drum-playing when they were 10, Kapetan also started on the kit years ago and got to understand the industry at a young age through talking to musicians who’d come by the diners his dad owned. But it was after graduation, when Minzenberger had a band with their dear friend Jack Henry (who engineered Where we’ve been, Where we go from here), that their paths finally overlapped when they were in need of a bassist and Friko was in need of a drummer. Kapetan and Minzenberger joined each other’s bands, and it’s exactly what you’d expect from a couple of barely-20-somethings in the DIY hub of the United States that’s getting nationwide attention for its youth underground scene and burgeoning zine culture.

“I think it’s important to note that the reason Jack asked Niko to play with us was because he was a really big fan of Niko’s music already, and he put me on to Niko’s stuff, too,” Minzenberger says over Zoom. “The Burnout Beautiful demos were out at that time and Jack showed me and I was like, ‘Oh, my God, he did all of this himself. That’s insane.’” A sweet element to our call comes via how Kapetan and Minzenberger answer my questions in conversation with each other instead of with me. At every waking turn, they offer each other affirmations and small gestures of kindness. They sit together on a living room couch and patiently take turns talking. I’ve spoken with a lot of bands who have a best friend’s rapport with each other; the deep, rewarding, nourishing sense of closeness they get from bonding over Chopin and Elliott Smith spills into the music. Friko genuinely seem inseparable.

“I was already a fan of the things you [Niko] had done prior to fully meeting each other and working together,” Minzenberger continues. “But then, as soon as we started playing, I was just so blown away with your musicianship and your ear and how driven and kind you were. And I think, on a personal level, I felt instantly connected in that way. And on a musical level, too. It was just exciting the whole time.” “I feel the same exact way, personally,” Kapetan immediately responds. “And that clicked first, as it should. Over time, musically, it got to a point where it was like, ‘Okay, this feels like we’re really doing our own thing—because you’re [Bailey] writing drum parts that are extremely unique to us and, over the years, it’s become obvious that it was meant to be.”

In 2022, Friko unveiled Whenever Forever, a five-song establishing shot of what the band was destined to become with Kapetan and Minzenberger’s bond as its steadfast nucleus. Songs like “Can I See U Again,” “Holdin’ On People” and “In_Out” were indie rock cuts that boasted a whirlwind of sonic checkpoints, warmly exuding everything from the mainlined synths of Wolfgang Amadeus Phoenix, thorny glitch-pop, nocturnal folk, chamber rock and the six-string glamour of Room on Fire-era Strokes. After putting out Whenever Forever, Friko took to SXSW this past March and blew the roof off every venue they played. Their live energy made it past security and arrived in Austin with them and, for any industry heads or unfamiliar festival-goers who may have been in attendance, I guarantee they all saved some of the band’s songs on Spotify right then and there. Since then, they’ve been playing gigs at the Empty Bottle and Schubas and continuing to hold their place in the DIY circles in Chicago.

Earlier in 2023, Friko unveiled the single “Crimson To Chrome,” a firecracker track that quickly positioned the Chicago duo as an explosive torchbearer for Gen-Z indie rock. The volume metrics were off the chart, as Minzenberger’s percussion ensconced Kapetan’s worn-in, sandpaper-polished singing like a fence of landmines. You can pick out familiar components in the band’s work and name them but, how they’re merged together—under the bow of Friko’s finesse and button-bursting energy—arrives untapped, nuanced and dramatic. Bassist Luke Stamos—whom Kapetan met in kindergarten—fills out the sound with throbbing, rhythmic undercurrent. After Whenever Forever was released, Friko began recording a new EP in staggered sessions. Scott Tallarida let them use his studio, Trigger, to put the pieces together, but it was hard to maintain a consistent workflow—given that Trigger is also an event space and, in Kapetan’s words, if someone had to have a town hall meeting, Friko was gonna have to cancel a session. The EP was coming together until Kapetan and Minzenberger made “Crimson To Chrome,” and Tallarida gave them some immediate advice on what to do with such an important directional moment:

“He said, ‘This is where it’s at. We need to record this stuff instead,’” Kapetan explains. “So we ended up abandoning [the EP], that’ll probably be a B-sides thing. We ended up getting four songs—‘Crimson To Chrome,’ one song that isn’t on the record, ‘For Ella’ and ‘Cardinal’—and we were just sending those around while finishing writing. And then we kept recording the rest of the album as we went along. It took a really long time.” Because Friko made Where we’ve been, Where we go from here in pockets of brevity before signing with ATO Records, there’s no real tangible start and stop date, save for the few days the duo decamped at another recording space for a few days.“It’s really hard to wrap my head around the timeline, because it was like that,” Minzenberger chimes in. “We spent a week at Palisade Studios, and that’s the only time that I can really concretely remember—just because it was the only time we got to spend a week straight working on it.”

From the first few seconds of “Where We’ve Been,” one thing is clear: Friko have leveled up. Where Whenever Forever was them getting their bearings and stitching together a consistent sound, Where we’ve been, Where we go from here is immediately hammered up to an 11. It sounds, from track one to track nine, like a live gig—which is not a practice that every band wants to embrace. Friko, however, aren’t much interested in toning it down for the sake of making it palatable to off-stage environments. “We wanted to get the live show on tape, because the EP was very much us learning how to record ourselves and piecing stuff together,” Kapetan says. “It wasn’t really like our live show. “It was definitely more produced in that sense,” Minzenberger adds. “[On Where we’ve been, Where we go from here], all of the songs were tracked with a live performance base and [we] built around it,” Kapetan continues. “We wanted to do—and maybe this is more in hindsight now—the unproduced produced kind of thing, whereas we wanted it to feel very live but, obviously, there are a lot of overdubs and it’s a big production.”

“Where We’ve Been” is, as Kapetan calls it, “the band song”—explaining that its initial construction was one rotation shorter, that it didn’t have the final sequence of the vox ensemble (Kapetan, Minzenberger, Stamos, Tallarida, Henry, Jackson Hamrick, Sofia Jensen, Stas Slyvka) singing “Where we’ve been / Where we go from here / Take your weight and throw your arms around me” and, instead, went quiet at its conclusion. While Henry and Tallarida were in the control room humming over the mix, they came to the shared conclusion that it wasn’t finished yet, that the song needed just one more part. “I’m really sensitive with that kind of stuff,” Kapetan says. “When I have a song finished, I don’t like changing the structure much—especially when we’re recording it for the record. And we were all really emotional already, and Bailey had this one idea to just go straight-forward with the drums. I was like, ‘I’ll just scream shit’ and Luke went harder on bass. And we ended up just doing that whole extra section, that was the first time we played the song that way. And we were all just sobbing by the end of it. It was the most intense feeling I’ve ever had in music.”

And that outro of voices speaks greatly of how Where we’ve been, Where we go from here came together in the first place: through a community of peers who are, also, their best friends. You can hear that truth everywhere, and it evokes the purest DIY energy possible across the album. This wasn’t a record made in somebody’s bedroom; it came to life via the magical touch of loved ones. “I feel so, so lucky, because it feels like it’s what it’s supposed to be,” Minzenberger says. “It’s such an emotional thing, to collaborate with people. And, to have it be with people that you love and trust so much and have so much fun with, it feels like the spirit behind the music. Everybody’s so brilliant and, to get to move off of each other, it feels like it’s what it’s meant to be.” “It took so long for this project to come together, in a way—in some type of tangible collection of songs—that it slowly built itself while our friend group was building,” Kapetan adds. “There’s just a kindred part to this that has felt really special. When you think of a band, you think of friends. That’s not, a lot of times, the case. But, with this record, it definitely was.”

Friko is hesitant to divulge the truth ethos of their own sound, but Kapetan eventually does—calling the album’s pacing “not set to a metronome.” What he means by that is each song is carried through by Minzenberger’s live drum performances, rather than any sort of traditional pacing cues. Even on a song like “Chemical,” their percussion is like a machine gun beneath Kapetan’s fleckless shredding, the “Woo!” he lets out at the track’s conclusion a proper, punctuated coda to the face-melting, rapid-fire instrumentation. “I think, the energy of the performances themselves, I really credit to you [Niko], because you have been such a huge advocate for just making it as real as possible and putting your all into it,” Minzenberger says. “You have so much energy when you perform, because you approach every performance as if it’s the only one that’s ever going to happen. It’s so easy to match you there, ‘cause it wakes me up so much. You’re just wanting the recording of this to capture us.”

Where we’ve been, Where we go from here is inspired by everything from classical concertos to the Garden State soundtrack to Led Zeppelin. Everything they’ve connected with or have listened to, even passively, enforces the way Kapetan and Minzenberger play alone and together. They love indie music, but they are also consciously trying to incorporate centuries-old piano music into their music, plucking away at techniques that might lead to a song that sounds like an amalgam of The Replacements and Leonard Cohen. The running throughline there is timelessness—and it’s something that Kapetan is thinking about often when he’s writing. “For me, if it’s one of those songs that start off with me and a guitar with some lyric in it that connects and some melody that just comes together and it feels like a statement that I could say when I’m 60,” he explains. “from my point of view as a vocalist, that’s my kind of thing.”

Minzenberger echoes that statement from a drumming perspective, too. “I try to just play to the song, whatever energy you [Niko] bring forth,” they say. “I try to listen to all of the nooks and crannies in the way you play each song—strum patterns, energy, anything you’re putting into it, I try to flesh it out in my brain and match that. One thing that I love about writing with you is it feels like everything is open on the table. We’re going to try everything. Even if it sounds like a ridiculous idea, we’re going to try it. And then, if it clicks, you’re going to feel that in your heart. And it’s something that, I think, we often experience at the same time.”

On a song like “For Ella,” a massive piano and string melody (performed by violinist Macie Stewart and cellist Alejandro Quiles) transports you to a high-stakes critique, or a packed opera house that’s fallen silent at the knees of Kapetan’s stark, spell-binding ballad. “Took a ride into the West Side to see the city with your own eyes,” he sings in a dainty, weathered countertenor. “But the flicker of light was too bright, you got back into the car. Ella, Ella, you’re a shooting star.” The connections that he and Minzenberger have with each other to Chopin and other classical composers is derived from the feelings that spectrum of music gives them. “Classical music can do that epicness without being Imagine Dragons-epic,” Kapetan says laughing, before passing the baton off to his bandmate.

“I heard Chopin for the first time in a movie and, within the first 10 seconds, I was like, ‘Whoa, what is this?’ and I had to find it,” Minzenberger adds. “That’s what got me playing piant, too, just hearing Nocturne in C-sharp minor in a movie. I was like, ‘This is incredible, I really want to learn how to do this.’ I think it was the power of instant connection with something. With Chopin’s Nocturnes specifically, I can’t wrap my head around how something can be so beautiful. There are some bits of it that are so complicated but still really accessible. Looking at the sheet music of some stuff, you have these insane runs where it’s 36 notes fit into one bar. It’s just ridiculous, that something can be so profound—and [we want] to try to access that in some way.”

A big part of Where we’ve been, Where we go from here is the tectonic alchemy of its sonics. There are varying levels of volume at play, a presence not out of place on an alternative record like this. But, when a song like “For Ella” bleeds into a lulling sense of quiet, only for Kapetan to yell out “Ave Maria” and send the album swelling into a no-wave free-for-all injected with big, swirling hooks, the duo’s range is on full display and it feels like an intentional, complicated mark of creative duality—that such larger-than-life music can arrive loud and sublime, submerged under the reigns of chamber pop and rock ‘n ‘roll and imprinted with personal, gut-churning soul.

“You can get that deep feeling from anywhere, no matter what it is,” Kapetan says. “There are so many different types of music from all of these different times, and you can just go back and [see how] it’s all just trying to achieve the same thing. But it always just means so much every time it’s done, if you do it with all of the heart you can give it. Do it with everything you got. Jack was doing sound at a show—I forget the artist’s name, but they’ve been experimental artists for years. All they do is show images and then, into the mic, they just make noises to the images, reacting to them. It’s insane but, if you put everything into anything, it’ll work. People will want to see it or listen to it.”

Minzenberger doubles down on that open-minded and passionate approach, harkening back to what they and Kapetan were saying about transposing live performances onto records. “You [Niko] always pushing for ‘Just be honest and just put your all into it,’ you write the exact same way,” they say. “And I think the reason the record is sequenced the way that it is is coming from that, too. It’s just whatever felt right, being next to each other.” Minzenberger brings up their fiery lead single “Crashing Through” and the drop that hits right after a fine-tuned drum fill, and likens it to a similar breakdown that happens on “For Ella.” “You can have that same impact in different contexts, and I just think that’s so cool,” they add. “But we’re not trying to be eclectic, I think is the thing,” Kapetan responds. “I’ve been trying my whole life, writing, to make more stuff sound similar to itself, because that’s been my problem forever. And, luckily, this record actually made sense in some type of way.”

On the cover of Where we’ve been, Where we go from here is a painting of a cardinal on the pendant of a gold necklace. So few animals have ever carried such copious amounts of symbolism, be it devotion, good fortune or, in some instances, representing the comfort of lost loved ones returning. The album’s closing track, “Cardinal,” is the song most emblematic of not just Kapetan’s songwriting, but Friko’s destiny as a band altogether. “The morning came and crushed me, the cardinal dropped his crown. Someone else, instead of me, killed all of their doubt,” he sings atop a double-tracked guitar part. “Jesus, where’s my fight now? I’ve had better days, but none quite like this.” Kapetan didn’t know that Illinois’ state bird was the Northern Cardinal prior to writing the finale. Instead, the animal represents a memory and the song carries inspiration from Nico’s “These Days.”

“It was the first show back I had after COVID, and it was just a solo show,” he says. “I played the show and I was covering that song and I broke down. It was just me and 10 friends, but it was really emotional—because it was the first show back. It was really intense. The day after the show, I wrote that song. The cardinal, it’s not something in concrete terms. It connects to that day, for me, and that performance.” “I remember that show very, very clearly, too,” Minzenberger adds. “Niko was playing, and all of this golden sunlight was pouring through the window. It was the most beautiful thing I had ever heard and seen. I was just like, ‘Goddamn, this is wonderful.”

At the heart of Where we’ve been, Where we go from here, there is a lingering sense of intensity, renewal and out-of-body connections to performance and writing. The whole record is one big thesis statement on, as Kapetan puts it, “wanting better for yourself and the people around you, but wondering how can you possibly do that with the world we live in.” Thus, there is burning. There is despair. But, there is also salvation and closure and resolution.

In just a matter of minutes, Where we’ve been, Where we go from here will make you run through a turnstile of emotions. “I’ll write a song, you’ll sing along,” Kapetan sings on “Until I’m With You Again.” “I’ll laugh, you’ll cry, our world inside a song.” It’s risky, poetic, sublime and intimate music that, subsequently, fits perfectly into the framework of Chicago’s lineage of boundary-pushing rock ‘n’ roll while also obliterating any preconceptions of what brutal, complex, feverish and experimental work is supposed to look and sound like. Through Kapetan’s lyricism, Minzenberger’s instrumentation and the collectively massive, beautiful love they hold for one another, Friko are animated, direct and vividly in-sync. And the world has never needed that kind of joyous, purposeful brilliance more than it does right now.

Watch the music video for “Crashing Through” below.

Matt Mitchell reports as Paste‘s music editor from their home in Columbus, Ohio.