One of Friko’s many clever strokes on their debut, Where We’ve Been, Where We Go from Here (2024), was to name a song after only one half of that album title. “Where We’ve Been”, the album opener and final released single, didn’t portend a proper concept album. Yet it revealed the self-perception of a hot young band with a classical ambition tempered by a smart sense of reserve. The lingering second half of the title, sung in two songs but not used (as might be predicted) in a framing song name, signaled a lack of commitment to any firm direction for album number two. That is something close to an ideal position for a talented new group: to be going places, for sure, but not being so certain about the destination.
The release of Friko‘s sophomore album, Something Worth Waiting For, coincides with an intense discourse in music criticism and on social media about how suddenly popular rock bands gain visibility and acclaim. To borrow from the Euthyphro dilemma, do people like “trend-simulated” music because it’s objectively good, or is it said to be good because they’ve been told to like it?
While Friko, as a young and increasingly popular band, could get caught up in that conversation, there’s no evidence that their rise was engineered through the means currently being debated. More importantly, their musical appeal is plainly populist, rarely evoking the bleeding edge of coolness and instead advancing the kinds of hooks and emotional delivery that have marked the last 30-some years of rock ‘n’ roll, acclaimed or not. Something Worth Waiting For owes to the heyday of Arcade Fire and to less-heralded groups like Hope of the States and Keane.
For much of Something Worth Waiting For, Friko revive the spirit of classic rock albums, especially those by early 1990s English rock bands. Not Britpop records proper, which might be an important distinction for music fans who lived through that period, as well as for younger folks encountering the sounds and stylistic silos of that time retrospectively. It’s dramatic, sometimes snarling music, like Radiohead’s Pablo Honey (1993) and Suede‘s Dog Man Star (1994), whose alternately piercing, tremulous, and pleasant vocals express the perspectives of bands coming to terms with being both relative newcomers and committed to evolving.
In many ways, these works provide a template for Friko singer and guitarist Niko Kapetan on Something Worth Waiting For, which begins with “Guess”, a song that indicts ambiguity in its lyrics and offers torrents of emotion that feel slightly undermotivated because the mood is already so heightened a minute and a half into the album. However, “Guess” works, on the whole, because the band and producer John Congleton arrange precise escalation points that reward the listener for waiting (for seconds, anyway) for the drop, time and time again. “Guess” nearly wins the loudness war all by itself.
However, on an album and at a point in the group’s career when anticipation is being thematized and dramatized, the choice to front-load Something Worth Waiting For with loud, crowded songs comes off as contradictory. As a counterexample, consider the gold standard of the Wrens‘ The Meadowlands (2003), an album whose subject and legacy are doggedness and anticipation. That LP begins with a soft summation of what the years have done to the band and the character in the song, then takes its sweet time building to anything less measured, which makes the later expressions of emotion more meaningful.
That’s not to say there aren’t pleasures in the first few songs of Friko’s sophomore album. David Fuller’s bass performance on “Still Around” is a particular highlight. Yet the album truly catches one’s ear with the subdued “Alice”, which adapts Alice in Wonderland into a song of caution and love. “Alice” is the first of these new songs to exhibit the sense of dynamic development that defined the best material on Friko’s debut record.
“Certainty”, like the child of Philip Glass and A Moon Shaped Pool, is the centerpiece of Something Worth Waiting For and without a doubt the most memorable song here. The composition for piano, strings, and voice(s) has some common elements with other Friko songs, notably an intensification of the vocal delivery at the midpoint. The song also includes a genuine climax, a feature that sometimes gets lost in the noise of other numbers.
As an elegant exception within an often maximalist album, “Certainty” reveals what Friko might pay closer attention to on its next outing: that the comparatively calm and quiet can make the listener lean in and better appreciate what’s there, rather than lose creative touches buried in a wall of noise. The lovely backing vocals of the title song bear this out, as a supporting element that steals the show as a kind of sonic oasis.