Friko's Sophomore Album 'Something Worth Waiting For'

Friko releases its sophomore album “Something Worth Waiting For” Friday, and the Chicago indie rock quartet will headline a sold-out show Saturday at Metro, 3730 N. Clark St. in Wrigleyville.

The band’s second record captures the chaos of young adulthood across nine songs that swing between scrappy guitar rock and lush chamber pop. It’s a significant step up from a debut that already turned heads internationally.

Friko earned serious attention with its 2024 debut, “Where We’ve Been, Where We Go From Here,” built around the chemistry of singer-guitarist Niko Kapetan and drummer Bailey Minzenberger, who met as classmates at Evanston Township High School. Since then, the band expanded to a four-piece, adding bassist David Fuller and guitarist Korgan Robb, and spent months on the road supporting that first record, writing and sharpening 15 new songs along the way.

“Once you play songs live and you get to spend enough time with them, they really start to take shape, they can start to sit in your body a little bit more,” Minzenberger said. “They’re less conceptual at that point. They start to have a life of their own.”

That road-tested quality shows.

The new album was recorded in two weeks of sessions with producer John Congleton, who pushed the band to convert those 15 demos into nine finished tracks under a tight deadline. Guitarist Robb said Congleton set the tone early. “He said at the very beginning, ‘Every record somehow magically finishes in time,’” Robb said. “We knew that if we were wasting time, he would let us know.”

Fuller echoed that sense of collective investment. “We put our all into this record, all four of us,” he told Block Club Chicago.

The band draws comparisons to Sufjan Stevens and Arcade Fire, acts known for anthemic indie rock with real emotional range, and “Something Worth Waiting For” earns those references honestly. One of the album’s standout tracks, “Choo Choo,” is a love letter to the CTA, written from the perspective of someone who’s been on tour long enough to miss the relative predictability of a train schedule. The song’s tempo stops and starts before breaking into a tambourine-driven groove. Kapetan sings “Wish I took the train today, wish I took it almost every day” with the kind of weariness that feels earned after months on the road.

The hook came fast. Instinctively, even.

“I just started singing ‘choo choo’ as a hook and thought that was funny,” Kapetan said. “But it felt right, and then we just leaned into it.”

The record doesn’t stay in that gear the whole time. “Still Around” lands as a tight power-pop punch. “Certainty,” on the other end of the spectrum, is a chamber pop ballad built around string arrangements by Jherek Bischoff, formerly of art-rock group Xiu Xiu. Kapetan sings about an emotionally charged reunion at a lake up north, and his voice stretches and breaks over the swells in a way that feels raw rather than rehearsed. The contrast between tracks like that and the boisterous energy of “Choo Choo” gives the album real range without feeling scattered.

Kapetan credited the expanded lineup for a lot of what made the new songs possible. “The big difference was having David and Korgan along, having new members, writing new parts, and that was exciting,” he said.

Chicago has always produced bands that write from the city and the neighborhoods outward. Friko fits that lineage, rooting songs in specifics like the CTA Red Line and the emotional geography of coming of age in a place that rewards toughness and punishes sentiment in equal measure. The Metro at 3730 N. Clark has launched plenty of Chicago acts into broader recognition over its decades on that Wrigleyville block, and Saturday’s sold-out show puts Friko squarely in that tradition.

Whether the album reaches the audiences those earlier comparisons suggest is something the band will find out over the coming months as touring continues. For now, four musicians who’ve spent the better part of two years developing these songs have delivered a record that sounds like it was built to last beyond the festival season, rooted in the specifics of Chicago and young adulthood, and recorded with enough ambition to reach past both.