On February 16th, I made my way to the intimate world of Shuga Records in Wicker Park to join the crowd of indie-rock enthusiasts who had already filled the space between rows of vinyl and graphic-painted walls. The mesmerized audience, mostly composed of 20-somethings clad in leather jackets and faded jeans, looked towards a small stage in the back of the room with buzzing anticipation as the stars of the evening appeared: Friko, fronted by Niko Kapetan on vocals and guitar and Bailey Minzenberger's on drums.

We were all there because, that very same day, the band had released their long-awaited debut album Where we’ve been, Where we go from here after five years in the Chicago indie scene. 

The record evokes a uniquely devastating mix of desperation, heartbreak, passion, and hope —surely, familiar emotions for anyone who has ever stood at the daunting precipice that separates youth from adulthood. It also marks a significant evolution for our 2023 Chicago Artists to Watch alumni, transitioning them from beloved local talents to emerging stars on the national stage, with the likes of Pitchfork describing Where we’ve been, Where we go from here as a “generational passing of the torch” channeling “the sound and spirit of 2000s indie-rock.” 

That night, Friko delivered a stunning, stripped-down acoustic performance of a select few songs from the record to promote their larger-scale release show at the Metro on March 1st.  Considering Friko’s passion for performance and the Metro’s storied legacy as a launching pad for rockstars, fans can anticipate a live show experience brimming with unfiltered energy and collective angst, bringing to life the same cathartic essence that is captured on the album.

The Monday following that acoustic set, I joined a call with Niko to reflect upon the album’s release and Friko’s journey up until now. Based on our conversation, it’s evident that for Niko and the rest of the band, this is just the beginning of a journey that’s both uncertain and exciting, fueled by authenticity, passion, and a lot of heart.

It’s been a few days since your album was released. I was at your acoustic set at Shuga Records, and I recall you saying that it had been three years since you started working on it. What’s it like for the record to finally be out and what’s the mood like among the band?

Yeah, it’s definitely trippy. It’s very surreal to have been playing those songs live for forever versus playing them now that people are going to know them. And like, after playing that show at Shuga Records, a lot of people were saying how much the album resonated with them and it means the world. It’s been our entire lives for the last few years.

Did you have a particular vision for the album when you first started working on it and if so, how did that vision transform throughout the process of creating it?

So, when we started, we knew we wanted to get our live show on record because when we made our EP, we’d only been a band for a few months, so we didn’t really have [live shows] under our feet yet. So, that ended up coming out as much more produced. So, when we started this we wanted to make this sound like a live show and I feel like halfway through we really figured out what that meant on the record, song-wise, and what it’s going to look like once it’s all done. From the beginning, we kind of had that outlook and that was kind of like - Scott [Tallarida], who helped produce the record —one of his biggest inputs was, you know, we need to get this energy you guys have in real life on tape and not overdo it.

Were there any turns or challenges while working on the record that you didn’t expect?

It was definitely a darker part of my life for many different reasons. There got to a point in the record where Scott actually – because he’s like 40-something and he has already done the whole music thing – he sat me down and he was just like “We gotta start having fun with this again. That’s the only way we’re going to get through it and everybody’s going to enjoy it.” Cause, yeah, when you’re trying to put something on paper that’s so emotional and personal, it definitely can make you kind of spiral at times. But with the help of everybody else, I’m able to get through it, and like, keep it going. 

So it sounds like that may have made it into the work itself and also, perhaps, with the help of the people you’re around, was able to turn into a healing thing for you.

Yea.

Seeing as you’re beginning to reach new heights, when you look back, what’s it been like coming up as a newer indie-rock band, specifically in the city of Chicago?

It’s definitely our first foray into the music industry. We’ve been coming up in Chicago for a few years and we’ve gotten really close to a lot of bands and people on the scene. It’s just so friendly, especially around the general indie-rock scene. But, whether it’s in the hip-hop scene or any scene, there’s a lot of nice people in all of it and it’s very welcoming. And it’s very eclectic, so there’s somewhere that everyone can fit in. The venues are generally really friendly with newer artists, so we were able to book a bunch of shows in one month. We had seven shows in one month and none of the venues necessarily bothered us, even though they maybe should have, but it helped us develop as a band and helped people hear what we were doing. 

I wouldn’t have done it anywhere else. Chicago definitely is the best place to come up as a band right now.

I read in another interview that when you finished recording “Where We’ve Been,” it was an emotional, teary-eyed moment for all of you and I wanted to ask if you could delve deeper into what that song specifically means to you and why you chose to make it the title of the album.

That song, even before we did the recording, it felt different from all the other songs in the sense that it has a slow-burn aspect to it. None of the other songs had that. I think the title ended up coming from those lyrics because it felt like it describes this record – how the making of it was such a long process and encapsulated a few years of time rather than just a few months.

That was the one song on the record that I kind of wrote in just a couple hours. It just kind of all came at once and then we arranged it the same day for the most part, so it kind of just had that magic. So, taking a lyric from that as the album name just felt right because it felt different from us in a cool way. 

From the POV of a listener, it seems like a lot of your music touches on the themes of how you navigate the uncertainty of being in your youth while trying to figure out how to live for the first time. I guess my question would be, in pursuit of your own dreams, how does that idea resonate with you personally, and how do you try to remain hopeful in the chaos of your 20s?

I definitely haven’t answered that for myself, but making this record definitely taught me that if you have persistence and find one thing that you believe in that you can do and just, like, do everything you can for it – [it will] become your purpose. And I’ve kind of been saying this a lot lately, especially as music becomes more of a full-time thing: you’re going to feel angsty, you’re going to feel depressed, you’re going to feel, um, empty at times, doing whatever you do. And that will happen when we’re doing music or whatever else. But if you find that one thing, you’ll feel, like, fulfillment in that, or, you know, it feels right to feel that way. You’re never really gonna solve that. And it’s kind of about being okay in that, you know. Sometimes you can, sometimes you can’t. 

I don’t believe that you can ever solve that. But, I’m still in my 20’s, so hopefully.

No, I totally get it. It’s not an easy question to answer, so thank you. 

Absolutely. 

I always think about it, like, any path is going to be difficult and all of them require hard work to succeed, so I think it’s about doing something where that struggle feels worth it to you – since it’s going to be hard anyways. 

Yeah! And in that way, it is less about hard work in the capitalistic sense and more about hard work for yourself, like you said. That’s where it pays off.

For sure. I was also wondering if we could talk a little bit about your sound. It’s very signature. It’s gritty and raw, but it also has an atmospheric kind of quality. So, I wanted to ask how you guys found that sound and what that process looked like for you.

Yeah, I think that was – all of our tastes at the time, me, Bailey, and Luke – really all loving ambient music. Bailey especially, like, they’re all music, too. Especially when they write, it’s like, very ethereal and much more patient and chill. And, even though drumming can be insane, I think that they bring that to the band, in addition to what we all like. Me and Luke obviously love ambient music as well and singer-songwriter music. And it’s just a neat balance because we love singer-songwriter stuff just as much as the loud stuff. And I’m sure there’s going to be, like, “heads” who hear this as a noisy record and will think the ballads are boring because they’re slow songs, but we wanted to try and combine those two things. 

I feel like often your lyrics come off as very poetic and even, almost, abstract sometimes. As the primary lyricist of the band, where do you gain inspiration from as a writer and how did you come into your personal voice/style?

I think it was definitely mostly through music because I’ve never been a big reader. Only recently did I start reading more. I especially never really read very much poetry, although I enjoy it. It comes from, like, people. I got really into Leonard Cohen right after high school. I loved early Modest Mouse for a really long time. So, it definitely comes from really good lyricists in music. And, eventually over time getting to this kind of point, when I write lyrics now – when it’s working, which is not very common – I’ll just turn off the brain and say shit and it comes out and for some reason, it works. That’s how “Where We’ve Been” was written. The right stuff will come out. And, you know, you hope to get better at that as you keep working at it.

How did you and Bailey come to start making music together?

I was playing in a band in high school and we were just playing friends' backyards and stuff. And we broke up about a year after I graduated high school because everyone else was going to college. So, I had recently started playing bass in Bailey’s band. So, I just asked them to play and we started going from there. And it was very, you know, natural. Our first show was in a really awkward fundraiser at a parking lot in Evanston. It was like, 15 people. But, yeah.

How do you hope the album will impact listeners? Is there anything you hope listeners will take away from it?

I mean, I hope that they can feel how I feel when I listen to my favorite records – that inspired feeling and deep, good sadness, I guess. And I hope it just helps them in some way like all my favorite records did. I can’t really say much else on that, I guess.

Lastly, what do you hope for the future of Friko and what are you most looking forward to as a band, whether in the short term or the long term? 

We’re all really looking forward to getting on the road and playing the music with the album having been released. Playing outside of the US, too. We’re very excited. 

In the short term, just trying to one-up on the next record. It took us a long time playing on the scene to get to this point. We only really got here because we got a good amount of songs that we liked, so we gotta do that again – but, even more songs. So, just working at that and trying to get better.