Friko – Something Worth Waiting For | Album Review
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ATO Records
I sometimes fear that I’m nothing but a prisoner of suggestion. With so much stimuli out there, am I actually parsing things, or am I just letting them steer me?
Let’s take, for example, the band Friko. I was really into the group’s debut, Where We've Been, Where We Go from Here, when it was released back in the early days of 2024. While listening to it, I’d often find myself thinking of Radiohead, but I couldn’t fully put my finger on why. Then I realized that one of my intros to Friko was a video on Youtube of them covering “Weird Fishes/Arpeggi” at their record release show. Was that it? Was watching one video enough to put them into my brain’s Radiohead cabinet? Am I even driving this car?
A few weeks after having this realization, I put the record on while hanging out with some friends, and one of them remarked that it reminded him of Radiohead. It was an interesting development, as I was positive that this guy knew nothing about the aforementioned cover. Then, months and months later, another friend turned to me during a Friko show at The Empty Bottle and said, “I’m going to tell my kids this is Radiohead!” He didn’t know they covered them either. The wheels began to turn again. Maybe my initial feeling was sound. Maybe I do have autonomy.
I bring all of this up because, as I listened to Friko’s new record, Something Worth Waiting For, I often found myself thinking about the Flaming Lips, and that old paranoia returned. I began to wonder, did this connection form because the band toured with the Flaming Lips not so long ago? Is my brain just making haphazard connections of convenience?
After some more thought, I’ve decided it doesn’t matter. Sure, maybe the connection first came to my mind because of that tour, but if we go a level deeper, isn’t it likely that creative threads linking the two bands are part of what led to Friko getting that support slot in the first place? Both groups certainly have an appreciation for the grander side of pop songwriting, something Friko really lean into on Something Worth Waiting For.
This record is Friko’s first as a four-piece after the addition of bassist David Fuller and guitarist Korgan Robb (side note: be sure to check out Robb’s other band, the courts), and though “sparing” is never a word that I would have used to describe Friko in the past, you can really feel them working on a bigger scale here. This first really struck me on “Choo Choo,” where the background harmonies throughout the chorus and outro have a really satisfying added depth. I felt the same thing one song later on “Alice,” where things get almost choral as the track drives to a close.
The song that I’d say most bowls me over here, though, is “Hot Air Balloon.” I can’t get enough of it. The song’s arrangement is absolutely killer, featuring some of the best bass lines that I’ve heard this year, and the way the lead guitar follows the main melody during the song’s chorus massages your brain in a way that’s just divine. It’s also maybe the best synthesis we get of the old Friko and the new, with the first verse giving us dual harmonies between Niko Kapetan and Bailey Minzenberger before things grow and grow to a triumphant finale that reminds you this is a capital-B Band that we’re dealing with here. I’ve seen Friko several times, and my favorite parts of their shows have always been when all four members are going all out singing together. Having that replicated in the closing minutes of this track and other songs like “Alice” and “Seven Degrees” really elevates the record.
Speaking of Friko live, I’ve been dying to get my ears on the studio version of “Guess” since I first heard it performed a year ago when the band opened for BC,NR at the Salt Shed. It’s such a perfect show-opening song, and I was curious to see if that would fully carry over on record. Well, in a perhaps unsurprising turn of events, it also works incredibly well as an album opener. I kind of don’t want to say much more about it because there are elements to it that shouldn’t be spoiled, but damn, what another great song.
One thing that I came to appreciate more about Something Worth Waiting For through multiple listens was the interplay between themes of travel and stasis. On the one hand, you have all these songs about different modes of transportation — “Choo Choo,” “Hot Air Balloon,” and “Dear Bicycle” — then you have lines like “In the background I'll be there / Because some things never leave there” on “Certainty” and “Someday we'll lay statues on this dirt beneath our feet / we'll be running circles round it just you wait and see” on the title track. Sometimes these themes are in direct contrast, particularly with “Hot Air Balloon” and “Choo Choo,” which are about escape, but as the album closes on “Dear Bicycle,” there’s a convergence that brings everything home.
Early on, the album’s closing track presents travel not as a means of getting away but as a means to explore, with Kapetan singing “Bicycle I'm waiting for you outside we've got things to do / there's alleys streets and avenues and gas stations we've yet to cruise / so stick around.” It’s a beautiful and relatable sentiment, this realization that exploration need not take you too far from home. As the track continues, we get a more bittersweet set of lines: “Bicycle your rust is showing, what has happened to your bones / You’re rusty now but have a drink, there’s kids around that want to play and you can’t let them down.” This is where I really came to understand how those themes of travel and stasis connect; the person who got so much from exploring is ready to move on. The bicycle and those gas station rides are not for them anymore, but the narrator still understands the power those moments held and recognizes that others might follow a similar path.
At the same time, there’s this sadness that comes with watching places and things grow old around you, whether that’s realized through rust on a bicycle or the dilapidation of the town around it. At some point, you just want to move on, but in doing so, you don’t want to forget the good ways those experiences shaped you. Maybe you leave, but those moments tied to that place sustain. That’s where track two’s “Wish I took the train today / Wish I took it almost every day / I’ll take it far away” connects with track five’s “In the background I'll be there / Because some things never leave there.” It’s the perfect place to end.
There’s something about the way Friko’s sound has changed from the first album to this one that’s tied up in this, too. They’ve definitely evolved and progressed, but through that, there are still these echoes and threads—in Niko’s yelps, in little piano passages, in the way that harmonies come together—reflecting who they were before. And not to be the Friko-Readiohead or Friko-Flaming Lips guy again, but I think that’s just another way that I see Friko fitting into the same lineage as those two bands. Radiohead somehow always sound like Radiohead, even when they put out an album that’s not in any way like the one that came before it. The Flaming Lips moved from noise rock to psych-pop while still maintaining a sense of theatrics that was core to their identity. The reason I think these types of bands are able to maintain a continuity is that their shifts are born of an organic desire to explore new things rather than a methodical “let’s change things up on the next one” approach. I’m not saying Friko LP1 to LP2 is The Bends to Kid A, but that’s the kind of range that seems to be building here. Who knows, maybe their next release will have me questioning my motivations for likening them to Unwound or Depeche Mode. Ultimately, all that really matters is that they sound like Friko. If they do, I’m always going to love it.
Josh Ejnes is a writer and musician living in Chicago. He has a blog about cassette tapes called Tape Study that you can find here, and he also makes music under the name Cutaway Car.
