The last time I spoke with Chicago indie rock duo Friko – comprised of vocalist/guitarist Niko Kapetan and drummer Bailey Minzenberger – was in November of 2023. They’d just announced their signing to ATO Records (home of phriends of PHILTHY like Deer Tick, Honey Harper, Joseph, Margaret Glaspy, Neal Francis, and Pink Mountaintops), along with a batch of tour dates that would kick off later that month at our very own Kung Fu Necktie. According to one of the venue’s bartenders, as of noon the day of the gig, the show had sold zero tickets… However, it wound up bringing in a good audience and, since then, the band have gone on to play some major shows in the City of Brotherly Love and Sisterly Affection, including a sold-out show at MilkBoy opening for WILLIS and a gig playing the mega-stage of Union Transfer as support for Royel Otis. And this coming Tuesday, 3/4, Friko will return to the 215 on their first-ever full-scale headlining tour, which will have them at The Foundry, a venue three times the capacity of that last headlining show in November of 2023.
Last February ATO Records put out Where we’ve been, Where we go from here, Friko’s 9-song LP, which Paste voted the #1 Debut Album of the Year and had AV Club (who ranked it as the 24th best album of the year) saying, “Turns out, Friko are comfortable traveling just about anywhere: piano-and-strings balladry (the very Elliott Smith-like ‘For Ella’), emo-leaning power-pop (‘Get Numb To It!’), and the kind of heart-on-sleeve, early-2000s indie-rock that few pull off convincingly (‘Crimson To Chrome’). More, please.” Last month the band even snagged a cover story for NME featuring an interview with Huw Baines and photos courtesy of Alexa Viscius, a buddy of Friko and bassist for fellow Chicago act Bnny.
Just yesterday I got a chance to catch up with Niko Kapetan over the phone, as Friko was enroute to Nashville’s The Basement East, who tells me that the last year has been an absolute blast: “Going to Europe and Asia was really cool. Japan and China was so cool for me, and then playing Chicago shows at The Metro and Thalia Hall which sold out.” He’s also happy to know that both new listeners and longtime fans and friends (Friko has been releasing music since 2019, including demo collection Burnout Beautiful, the Whenever Forever EP, and an Audiotree session) seem to be getting and appreciating the full-length: “It was great hearing the general reactions. The rawness of it got through and people seemed to understand it as a whole.”
Those who heard the latest edition of Philthy Radio (now streaming), my monthly show on Y-Not Radio (where Friko’s “Get Numb To It!” was #111 on the Top 224 of 2024, outranking any entry by Royel Otis, whose last American tour they opened), heard “Sliip Away,” a Friko song even more recent than Where we’ve been, Where we go from here. The song can be found on an expanded edition of the album, which dropped last November and features eleven bonus tracks, including several unreleased songs, a couple demo versions, and a handful of live recordings.
“That was like three years ago, maybe. I did that on piano and vocals, but I just didn’t know what to do with it, but then Bailey and our engineer, Jack [Henry], wanted to retouch it, and I really liked the way that it came out,” Niko tells me of “Sliip Away,” going on to explain, “We had those five songs we recorded before we recorded the album, and we wanted to put them out, and it was like, if we didn’t do a deluxe edition, we’ll probably never release them. And then the live songs are from the record release show at The Metro.”
I’m speaking with Kapetan two dates into Friko’s current tour, but he says the shows have been going very well so far: “It’s been really fun! It’s been cool to play other cities and play a longer set. And once we get a four-piece, which we’ll have by Philly and New York, we’ll be playing some new songs.” When I ask what can be expected of these headlining sets, he tells me, “We’re trying to combine the raw energy and bombastic-ness with subtleties, to make it a really dynamic show. You’ve got the ballads and the ragers, and then it’s just about trying to fill out the middle parts.” The jaunt has Friko joined by openers and phellow phriends of PHILTHY Peel Dream Magazine, who I met last July and who Niko says he’s a big fan of: “They’re amazing. It feels like a perfect show. It’s a really good vibe.”
Friko’s headlining dates take them through the end of May, but they have a handful of festival appearances scheduled for this summer (Summerfest in Milwaukee, Praia Fluvial do Taboão in Portugal, and Iron Blossom Music Festival in Richmond). I ask Niko if he has a favorite live setting at this point, and he admits that he appreciates being able to play the variety: “I get something out of every type of show. It’s just so dependent on the crowd. It can be really cool to play one of these 300-capacity rooms with all those people, but we just played a DIY Chicago show a few weeks ago, where it was just the people who had been there from the beginning, and we debuted a few songs, and that was great.”
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