FRIKO - Something Worth Waiting For

Cause there’s hardly enough in this world

To make us happy

Their debut “Where We’ve Been, Where We Go From Here” had been included right away and without hesitation among the best of 2024, marked by a purity of songwriting matched by few, submerged beneath the noisy guitars typical of indie rock. The return of Friko, led by the mind and pen of singer-guitarist Niko Kapetan, comes as both a reaffirmation and an expansion of their sound, with production on the second album “Something Worth Waiting For” landing in the (good) hands of the chameleonic, eclectic John Congleton (St. Vincent, Angel Olsen, Explosions In The Sky, Xiu Xiu), always in search of genuine sonorities and forever clutching a portrait of Steve Albini, whose idea of the most direct and authentic possible approach to putting projects on record he carries forward.

In this case, that outlook translates into noise-tinged nuances that veer at times toward power-pop, at times toward rougher, more slacker territory, alternating with orchestral compositions that glance toward avant-garde classical music and the symphonic ballads of the Seventies, alongside passages that draw on folk and chamber-pop ideas, putting an endless amount on the table. Among the influences are the Arcade Fire of “Funeral“, Bill Callahan, Modest Mouse, Wednesday, Death Cab For Cutie, Foxing, the inevitable Bright Eyes and Radiohead, and many others. Among the key ingredients is the indissoluble, emotional interweaving of spontaneous lyrics and music, with the latter reaching for what the flow of words alone can't achieve; the driving theme is the ability to stay afloat despite adversity and never stop searching for the light at the end of the tunnel, perfectly balancing the idealism typical of youth with the confidence born of lived experience.

The album opens on the swelling drones of the raw, ragged guitars of “Guess”, amid Radiohead-esque winks blended with emo echoes, followed by the driving, nineties-flavored power-pop turn of “Still Around”, which plays on the duality of failure and hope, before fleeing aboard a train with “Choo Choo”, alternating breathless sprints and slowdowns all the way to one of the record's peaks, the aching, exquisitely Beatles-esque “Alice”.

The theme of travel resurfaces throughout the album, particularly amid the piano notes and strings of “Certainty”, which portrays a long wandering across different means of transport, between mishaps and wonders, describing the singer's daily commute to a warehouse job in Rogers Park, Chicago, closing the curtain with a nod to Peter Weir's masterpiece “The Truman Show”.

Another excellent key passage is marked by the choruses of the bittersweet “Hot Air Balloon”, while “Seven Degrees” moves between alt-country and folk, partly recalling the beautiful “Father And Son” by Cat Stevens; it's no coincidence that the track draws inspiration from a remark made by Kapetan's father, referring to the theory of six degrees of separation (which he mistakenly called seven), according to which any two people on Earth are separated by a chain of no more than six social connections.

Last but not least, the record reaches its peak with the instrumental passages of the title track, a genuine emotional rollercoaster, leaving the ending to the moving pseudo-ballad “Dear Bicycle”, where the narrator of the lyrics, now aware of having reached maturity and greater self-awareness, looks back one last time.

Track after track, “Something Worth Waiting For” slips by at breakneck speed, doggedly chasing a glimmer of hope while retaining an undertow of darkness, the trademark of this Chicago project, whose standard remains as high as ever.

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01/05/2026