Nearly three years ago, a collection of bands from Chicago’s teenage-led indie rock scene stormed Thalia Hall on June 5th, 2022 to celebrate the release of breakout trio Horsegirl’s Versions of Modern Performance.
The billed acts, Post Office Winter, Lifeguard, Friko, and Horsegirl, each have their own approach to indie rock as central members of a wider movement underpinning Chicago’s current music scene. This youth-led revival of art, culture, and community couldn’t have come at a more inopportune time. Many of the groups found their sound at the height of the pandemic from bedrooms and garages rather than stages and practice rooms. An artistic explosion is just what Chicago needed: the ever-growing underground music and zine pose a response to the youth’s need for creative-togetherness.
Just over a year since the release of their debut album, Where we’ve been, Where we go from here, Friko, fronted by vocalist/guitarist Niko Kapetan and drummer Bailey Minzenberger, are about a quarter of the way through their first headlining tour. A bit older than the rest of the bands central to the Chicago underground scene, Friko has a different origin story. Both from the Chicago suburbs, Kapetan and Minzenberger grew up in similar circles, playing in local bands all throughout high school. Finally coming together in 2019, the band’s gone through a plethora of changes: the addition of new members and a shift in direction.
I sat down with Niko ahead of Friko’s March 7th show at the Music Hall of Williamsburg to discuss these changes—life in the Chicago scene, touring, creating collaborative art, and where, fittingly, he hopes to take the band going forward.
Note: This interview has been edited and condensed for clarity.
Two years ago, I saw Friko play at the Horsegirl album release show at Thalia Hall. That was the first time I was introduced to your music, and it was this violently electric moment. You could see everyone in that crowd swaying and moving, even people who weren’t familiar with Friko. What is it like being part of such a vivid scene and captivating an audience in the way you do? How do you work to keep that electricity and vibrance in your sound?
That’s a great question. I mean, the scene has been the first and foremost thing that has inspired our sound outside of the music that we grew up loving. And just inspired us to play around that time. Playing five or six shows in Chicago a month—just in Chicago—and seeing all these bands that are around you and are great and that still being the case is so inspiring.
As for keeping electricity and energy going as we tour so much, it’s definitely so much harder because it’s not like you’re playing one show a week or have a break. You’re playing 30 shows in 30 days sometimes—that’s not true, that’s no days off (laughs), but it’s a lot of shows so there are definitely off days, but, especially now, we play a lot of new songs. People know the older songs now, but they used to not so we had to create all of the energy ourselves. Now, we have a little bit of help from the audience, sometimes a lot of help from the audience, to bring that energy.
As I was listening to the record, I heard all of these layered tracks and group vocals that made the songs feel like rallying cries, bar songs, or anthems. I’m curious how collaboration, both internally as a band and with others in the scene, functions for you; how do you like to collaborate?
Some of those group vocals are with Sofia from Free Range and Penelope from Horsegirl, or Eli Schmitt, who does a lot of the artist stuff. I’m pretty sure those are the only ones that you’re seeing on the group vocal stuff, but I’m pretty sure I invited everybody, and that was just who could make it on a certain day. It was really special to do that with those people.
When me and Jack [Lickerman] recorded the “Ballroom Dance Scene” single for Horsegirl, that was my first introduction to that scene, and so [working with members of the scene on our album] was super important obviously for us. Me and Kai [Slater] from Lifeguard and Sharp Pins would get together every so often and do writing things. I hope to one day have a side band [with Kai] or something. But we’d always do this one Nerves cover, “Many Roads to Follow,” whenever we are playing the same show. I love that song.
That’s with the younger scene, too. We’re a little bit older, and then there’s the scene that’s like a little bit older than us; especially Bailey [Minzenberger] is like really tapped in. Bailey plays every once in a while with Finom or V.V. Lightbody. The age range within the indie scene is very cool.
Moving away from Chicago, I realized how [the scene] is having such a vibrant moment. Is this collaboration and this community spirit in your music continuing into potential future projects?
I think yes, especially because it’s so collaborative within the band now. The first record I would kind of just bring finished songs and like vocal and guitar, vocal and piano, verses now like a lot of the time—sometimes that’ll happen—but sometimes I’ll just bring like a seed of an idea and we’ll write it from there as a band. Also, we’ve just been on the road so much and have so many of the same shared experiences in the past year. I think it’s gonna be a much more cohesive, much more singular idea. We’re all sharing the same experience, so we can all put the same but different spirit into [our sound] to make it even greater than it was before.
Writing in a more sit-down setting versus writing on tour, what do those differences look like?
I mean, writing on tour, I feel like we’re starting to get more comfortable doing that because these past 6-8 months were the first time we toured with this setup of the band. Our two new members, David [Fuller] and Korgan [Robb], have been great. We’re trying to install a seat in the back of the van so we can sit back there with a guitar. I basically just sit in the trunk sometimes and play the guitar, but it’s really, really tough to do that because it’s so loud (laughs). And we have a trailer it’s carrying back there too, so it’s not great, but it is inspiring. When we’re home, we write at the practice space three or four days a week, and if I’m writing, I’m just, you know, writing at home, sitting at the piano, sitting with a guitar.
That’s awesome. At least when I listened to this record versus previous tracks, there’s a very clear deviation or reworking of your sound. I think especially in those more orchestral instruments—the cello and the violin usage—there’s such a difference. What was the process like reworking your sound in such an obvious way? Were there difficulties in that, or was it this natural kind of progression?
Yeah, for the debut, we always knew we wanted some orchestral stuff involved. “For Ella” was kind of our big trial doing that at a full scale. The record as a whole, we just wanted—versus as our EP before that—we wanted it to feel just like how it feels live. The EP didn’t feel like that because we recorded it; we tracked everything separately. We’d been playing as a band for a few weeks before we tracked the EP, so we weren’t really a band yet.
When listening to the record, some of the songs sounded so incredibly similar to when you were first trying out some of those tracks a couple of years prior [at the Thalia Hall show], and that’s really impressive. I feel like that’s not a really common thing. You have a full understanding of the body of your work or what your work should look like, which is also very impressive. I’ve read that there was a lot of improvisation involved in this record. When you go into a project with an idea of what you want the record to look like, and then improvisation comes in, are there some difficulties in that process; seeing the record move in ways you maybe didn’t expect it to or is that part of the process for you?
For this record, the improvisation was mostly overdubbing over the live tracks. The songs were pretty set in their place. Bailey was doing [most of the improvisation] because Bailey was the only one who could improvise so they could do that on the first record, whether it be on piano or whatever it would be. There were songs like statues that were live songs until they were recorded. “For Ella” was never what it was until it was recorded. It’s our dream to play with a full orchestra one day, maybe at the Chicago theater or something, but it didn’t and still hasn’t sounded like that live. I love how we do it live. Bailey plays guitar, but it’s possible to do it like that live while touring. [When we recorded “For Ella”], we just set the mic up. We had a few parts for “For Ella” that [Macey Stuart from Fenom], recorded but then [the band] just, we let them—we set them free—and they just you know, track after track we’re just recording just of the dome… it was incredible on “For Ella.”
I was curious about the differences between playing at home and touring. I know in Chicago there’s such a bustling, creative scene. When you go on tour, I was wondering if there were any differences as you perform in different cities, or is it kind of the same spirit?
This is the first headlining tour we’ve done, which will be the first time that a relatively substantial amount of people are coming to see us play. That still hasn’t been the case [when touring], except in Asia. We haven’t played any shows outside of Chicago where there’s a lot of people coming to see us. That’s the thing with touring, it feels, not like the band against the world, but like we have to hold the magic ourselves because it’s just us and we don’t know anybody else. There’s a lot of other nice people on the road, but it’s different.
In adding new members to the band, I’m curious what that process looked like or how you’ve all come together and started working as a group.
We’ve had to work through a lot of stuff with touring, especially in the last year since this record came out. We had to work through a lot, and we came out on the other side way closer than before. It’s inevitable if you’re trying to tour with people that you actually love and like to be with. If you don’t care about that, if you just want to be like, “let’s play the music it’s whatever and we’ll do our own thing” then you don’t need to confront issues. We don’t want that to be the case. It’s been one of the biggest lessons of my life: “How do you mesh with other people, how do you make things work, how deep can relationships go?” Touring pushes us to that point.
In future projects, who are some artists you hope to collaborate with that you haven’t gotten the chance to yet?
I’m trying to think…there are so many. I’m trying to think of not easy answers. I still want to do something with Kai [Slater] since we still haven’t done anything official. We just went on tour with Water From Your Eyes. They make really cool music; I’m really curious to see what that mashup would be like. I messaged and talked a little bit with Cameron Winter. That would be a really cool one. I love his new record. We were playing with Black Country, New Road. Ants From Up There was my record of the year when it came out. There are so many, I’m trying to think of ones that are more realistic and are more our age. In that scene, we’ve also been really friendly with Been Stellar. I think they’re a really cool band; we’d love to do something with them—they’re a New York band.
Mentioning Black Country, New Road, there are so many similarities in your debut’s sound and their sound. Are they a big inspiration for you?
Definitely, for sure. I love their lyricism, and the new direction, too, is great. We were doing that orchestral thing, and that record kind of gave me a direction to go off of.
Your lyricism is so impressive. I was curious what the process of writing lyrics is like: if it’s an equally collaborative record or if someone in the band writes most of the lyrics.
I pretty much write all of the lyrics. I’m a horrible, horrible writer. Horrible grammar, honestly, and most of the time, a bad speaker. When there’s a musical thing, when [the track] feels really perfect for me to say something over it, then [the lyrics] just come out. That’s what I rely on because that’s the only way I know I can write. I wrote the Where We’ve Been chord progression on guitar in my room, and I just wrote all the lyrics in one sitting. That was the first time a full song came out at once. But yeah, [the lyrics] are fully reliant on the music beneath. I don’t think there’s anything wrong with that; it’s just the only way I can do it.
I’m very impressed that you could do it that way. I think some of my favorite things about your guys’ tracks are the lyrics—lots of beautiful images, whatever you do… keep doing it.
Thank you. Yeah, it’s kind of just caring, too. Caring about the lyrics, like I don’t want to be a cheap shot on that. Some of my favorite artists are just like the best lyricists as well, so I don’t want to be cheap on that.
With that in mind, is every song you write about something deeply personal to you in some way?
In some way. Sometimes more directly with an experience I can reference. Sometimes, it’s the combination of the lyrics with the music that makes it more personal. “Where We’ve Been” is fully narrative and very directly about very specific things in my life, and then something like “For Ella” feels very personal but is actually a fictional story. The music will make it feel right or not.
And, relating to the title, Where We’ve Been, Where Do We Go From Here, what are your future goals? Sorry, that’s kind of stupid…
No, we can say where do we go from here (laughs). I’m excited to play New York; Hall of Williamsburg has been a venue I’ve wanted to play for a long time. We haven’t done a full headlining tour ever. More touring and writing. I guess there are only a few different things you can do. We do want to get into scoring for various things. Me and Bailey love scoring. We definitely wanna do something up for a TV show or a movie or whatever it may be.
I can totally see this music in some indie film.
Thank you. Or Christopher Nolan (laughs).
Oh yeah, that would be a trip. That would be awesome.
