As you might expect from a scene named after a Neu! song, the young bands emerging from Chicago’s Hallogallo collective see themselves as torchbearers for previous generations of cutting-edge rock. Friko fit the mold, as a precocious pair namechecking ’90s indie rock, post-punk, Leonard Cohen, and, why not, Chopin. Someone who came of age in the early 2000s might also hear Saddle Creek’s all-hands, band-camp blowouts in Friko’s surging drama—or the blog-rock bands that made guitars and drums exciting again in the age of mashups, or maybe the buzziest act at a late-aughts CMJ showcase or Empty Bottle afterparty. But even if Friko recall the sound of those days, their debut album, Where we’ve been, Where we go from here isn’t just a throwback. It carries the spirit forward, reaffirming that indie rock, as a style and ethos, can still feel like the most exciting thing a young person could be into.
Despite its bullish title, Where we’ve been doesn’t scan as a monolithic statement of purpose, but rather a presumptive greatest-hits compilation. It’s no slight to say that it could be just as enjoyable on shuffle; nearly every song feels designed to either begin or end a live set, whether at SXSW, Schubas, or even Bonnaroo. Only the finale, “Cardinal,” is locked into sequence as an acoustic comedown. Friko’s songs open grandly and gather intensity all the way through their equally grand closings; these aren’t just anthems in the abstract sense, they’re theme songs. And even when the lyrics turn desperate (“It doesn’t get better, it just gets twice as bad,” from the bittersweet, tightly wound “Get Numb to It!”), Niko Kapetan’s swashbuckling trill recasts the subject matter as a hero’s journey.
“Twenty years spent above this place/You could smell the iron from the room,” Kapetan sings as the album’s preamble, a curious image that conjures the smell of blood, of trains, of something that should be in motion. From that point forward, Where we’ve been might as well be a blues album, given how much time Friko spend at a crossroads, forced to choose between struggle or complacency, life or death, going big or going home.
Twin peaks “Where We’ve Been” and “Crimson to Chrome” cleverly reenact the pervasive drive to get out of a rut and into the groove, hammering at remarkably similar melodies until the arrangements crack open. “Chemical” sounds like it learned its riff from the Walkmen’s “The Rat”—and also, more importantly, that a song can be all tension for four minutes. When Kapetan yells the title over and over, the band shifts into what sounds like a truncated time signature, as if they need to knock out the chorus as quickly as possible before their studio time runs out. Even a song as blatantly bleak as “Get Numb to It!” can double as celebration rock, its a cappella finale sounding like a gang of drunken football fans chanting their school’s fight song hours after the home team has left the field in triumph.
There are ballads, too. But most of the time, Kapetan operates at a similar emotional pitch to a Japandroids song, as if it’s the last song he’s ever going to write. In “Crimson to Chrome,” he wails, “I’m sitting here writing the same sad song/With the cogs on fire/Spinning on and on/ Till I’m old and tired/Even then I’m on fire.” But whichever direction they take—pensive piano etudes or rave-ups that channel the feeling of being burned alive—Friko’s goal is the same: to make the same sad songs sound like the bonfire for a new generation to rally around.
