Friko
Where we've been, Where we go from here
ATO
ABOVE THE CURRENT
On a cursory listen, you could think that the debut album by Chicago’s Friko is a long-lost Bright Eyes record. Both the album cover and singer Niko Kapetan’s warble bear a striking resemblance to Conor Oberst’s early output under that moniker, and these nine songs are fueled by the same kind of raw and unfiltered emotional gravitas that haunted those Saddle Creek recordings so powerfully. Yet Where we’ve been, Where we go from here is no mere homage. Rather, this is an album that sounds like it’s always existed, made by a band that sounds like it’s been around for just as long. Considering Friko only formed in 2019, that’s impressive.
The fact that this is Friko’s first release as a duo (although former bassist Luke Stamos does appear on it) doesn’t mean it’s all White Stripes minimalism, however. Quite the opposite. The whole record is a dense, lush, and atmospheric experience that draws you into a rich, layered world that both enhances and reveals the tender weakness of the lyrics. Opener “Where We’ve Been,” for example, starts off sparse and uncertain, but then constructs a sonic cushion around itself, its despondency and despair multiplying every few seconds, the density of what the song becomes—all drum crashes and walls of guitars and feral vocals—forming a protective layer to guard the exploded heart and frazzled energy at its center. It’s that stuff which makes this an album you really feel rather than just hear, because these songs course through every fiber of your soul.
It happens with the untethered raucousness of “Crashing Through”—a song that lives up to its title—and with the more hushed yet still epic “For Ella.” Elsewhere, “Chemical” thrashes with a furious post-punk and baroque-pop restlessness. It’s followed immediately by the almost Elliott Smith–esque dourness of “Statues,” which conveys a sense of abject loneliness and hopelessness but, in its warm fuzzy feedback, also manages to offer comfort and salvation. “Until I’m with You Again” is probably the most overtly melancholic on the album, as Kapetan opines sadly over a tender piano line, his voice cracking, breaking, faltering—almost perfectly beautiful, but not quite, which only adds to the song’s majestic vulnerability.
Penultimate track “Get Numb to It!” contains shades of early Arcade Fire, but not so much that it distracts from Friko’s own music or the story they’re telling. That narrative—however abstract, however non-linear, however based in feeling rather than plot—comes to a close with the plaintive “Cardinal,” a lone, forlorn birdsong echoing around in the desolation of a life, if not a world, that’s been decimated and will never be the same again. You might not know why, and it hurts like hell, but there’s solace in that imaginary bird’s defiance, just as there’s solace in the song itself. “Then the evening came and crushed me / The cardinal hit the ground,” sings Kapetan softly. “Someone else instead of me figured it all out.”
And then, the final self-referential line: “Niko, where’s your fight now?” Kapetan’s voice soars as the song calms down, reduced to a few tender whistles, a world waiting to be rediscovered stretching out along the sunrise.
