When Friko appeared on The Cover last January, the band – then a duo of frontman Niko Kapetan and drummer Bailey Minzenberger – were on a victory lap. Breaking out of the same ridiculously fruitful Chicago scene that had birthed Lifeguard and Horsegirl, Friko were balancing sold out world tours with late night TV show appearances and ecstatic reviews of their debut ‘Where We’ve Been, Where We’re Going’, which revealed Kapetan to be a songwriter of precocious talent and the band a thrillingly, life-affirming indie-rock force of nature.
But inside, Kapetan’s world was capsizing; he’d admitted to NME at the time that he’d “felt a little disconnected” amid their rapid ascension. As the band’s fame grew, he was moving further away from the scene that made him and the freedom he once knew. And so, from that dissonance comes Friko’s second album, ‘Something Worth Waiting For’, a dynamic musical accomplishment laced with an inescapable feeling of heavy melancholy.
Musically, producer John Congleton (St. Vincent, Wallows) catches the sound of the band (now Kapetan and Minzenberger with guitarist Korgan Robb and bassist David Fuller) ready to burst out of their collective skins. On the dizzying whirlwind of recent single ‘Choo Choo’, Kapetan is sick of the hustle and bustle, constantly entrapped by the feeling of being in a rush, hopping on endless flights from gig to gig. “I wish I took the train today, I wish I took the train everyday,” he sings, knee-deep in the fantasy of a 9-to-5 existence.
Kapetan doubles down on his escapist dreams on the Radiohead-meets-Rilo Kiley charmer ‘Hot Air Balloon’, where he sings: “There’s singers and painters… And bands with their pretty songs… I don’t want none of it. I wanna be a hot air balloon.” The way Kapetan delivers the lines are bratty and ever so slightly desperate. As the song goes on, his delivery becomes more captivating and urgent: “I don’t want! I don’t want! I don’t want to be it!” It’s a protest against fame, his life and an advocation for the freedom he once had.
This theme of returning back to a simpler time is revisited on ‘Seven Degrees’, ‘Alice’ (with its plea to “don’t look in the mirror!”) and the heartbreaking, six-minute closer ‘Dear Bicycle’, where a slowly rusting bike becomes a metaphor for aging (“I was younger then / I’m not younger now”). As much as ‘Something Worth Waiting For’ is a confident, seemingly effortless next step into the musical big leagues, it also feels like a warning from Kapetan to himself: to step off the brakes before the whole beautiful machine that is Friko falls apart.
