“Once I got one of those pedals, it was just like, ‘That’s the sound.’ It feels like your amp is about toexplode”: Meet Friko, the Chicago indie darlings with guitar tones rigged to blow

Friko play live: [from left] Korgan Robb, Niko Kapetan and David Fuller.

When Chicago-based indie rockers Friko were writing and recording their first album, 2024’s Where We’ve Been, Where We Go from Here, it wasn’t hard to keep the sound lo-fi. Singer Niko Kapetan was the band’s lone guitarist, so there wasn’t much that could be done to stretch out the sound.

“That’s what we stuck with, because it was honest for that time,” Kapetan says. “But on this one, we could kind of expand on ideas and go to some places that we wouldn’t have been able to go with the first record.”