FRIKO - Interview

ETHEREAL.PRESS

Tell us about Friko.

FRIKO

Friko is a Chicago Rock band. We’ve been playing on the extremely vibrant and supportive Chicago scene for 3 years now and have played almost every club in the city. Bailey and I met in high school after Luke and I had been playing music together since 6th grade in various groups.

A year or so passed and Bailey asked me to play bass in their band. After doing that for awhile, the band Luke and I were in in high school was disbanding so I asked Bailey to join and it was an amazing fit from the start.

Our debut record is a culmination of these past few years of practicing constantly, living together, and becoming closer and closer through all of that. Writing, recording, and mixing this record was truly a family affair in that it was just the band, our best friend Jack Henry engineering and mixing, and our longtime friend Scott producing and letting us use his space Trigger Chicago to record.

ETHEREAL.PRESS

Talk to us about the track ‘For Ella.’

FRIKO

'For Ella' originally started off just as a piano piece that I was gonna give to a friend to use for their podcast.

Over time, I realized I really wanted to write a full song around a piano ballad along the lines of Waltz #1 by Elliot Smith. Once I had the story for it, I finished the song with piano and vocals. When we recorded the song, our friends and master musicians Macie Stewart and Alejandro Quiles recorded violin and cello and really brought it to that place that we wanted from the beginning for the song to have that 'classic' kind of sound.

ETHEREAL.PRESS

Tell us a bit about your art direction and how the band likes to present itself visually.

FRIKO

The past year or so and for this album we really just wanted to present ourselves in the most forward and vulnerable way possible since that’s what the record had become by the time we finished it. Our friend Alice Avery has done a lot of visual work for us and their work on the For Ella video was truly a highlight of our collaborative work with others.

But as a whole, we just want people to get to know us as much through the visuals as they can through the music.

That's why the 'Crimson to Chrome' music video is just footage from our first tour, because that was such a new and important time for us and we wanted to put that out there.

ETHEREAL.PRESS

Talk to us about your upcoming album, ‘Where we've been, Where we go from here.’

FRIKO

We’re just so proud of how this record turned out because we wanted to get our live show on record and we really feel like we did that. As I said, we made this record mostly ourselves and with help from Scott and Jack which meant a lot of really high “highs” and really low “lows”.

The cathartic feeling of figuring out something we never knew before, but then the hopelessness of feeling like we hit a wall that we didn’t yet have the knowledge to get through. We knew there was no other way to do it because we were the only ones who could put the amount of heart into it that it needed, but we just hope this record helps people as much as it helped us.

ETHEREAL.PRESS

What can you preview listeners on with this upcoming release?

FRIKO

It’s a lot to ask nowadays, but we’d love for people to listen to the record as a whole since we made it with the intention of flowing like in full from start to finish.

ETHEREAL.PRESS

What inspired you to explore indie rock / pop aesthetics?

FRIKO

It's the music we’d grown up listening to and what we loved in high school. It was what came naturally so we really had no other choice.

But we wanted to make sure we explored the full emotional and musical spectrum we were capable of exploring because power pop is amazing but it’s only a small part of the music we love. 

ETHEREAL.PRESS

I read a bunch of comments on your YouTube that stated you were on ‘Fortnite Radio.’

Can you tell us a bit about that?

FRIKO

It’s really funny to me. “IN_OUT” plays on the underground station in the cars in Fortnite. I grew up playing GTA 5 and I found a lot of music that I actually liked on there so it’s a cool full circle. 

ETHEREAL.PRESS

What’s something audiences would be surprised to learn about Friko?

FRIKO

When recording or writing stuff we’ll all switch between instruments with Bailey recording guitar sometimes or myself recording percussion.

We all play a little of everything (especially Bailey) so we don’t have too much ego on our main instruments.

ETHEREAL.PRESS

What’s next for Friko?

FRIKO

Being on the road as much as possible and writing the next record. For us, it’s all about getting better and better musically, so we’re already back in that mindset.