Friko At Schubas Tavern

Every week I listen to way too many artists trying to find music to share on this page. I check recent releases on Bandcamp, upcoming shows at local venues, and suggested artists on Spotify but I still struggle to find music that I like enough to share. As I was going through this routine search a couple months ago I found the band Friko. The first song I found was “In Out” (unreleased) which I immediately liked, but it was the song “Half As Far” (also unreleased) that really drew me in. Go listen to it on YouTube and you’ll see what I mean.

There’s a very specific feeling that their music expresses. The best way I can describe it is that you may not know what they’re singing about, or even retain any of the lyrics, but the overall emotion of the music is so consuming that you understand what they’re saying perfectly. It’s almost as if the artist is singing directly to you. A couple other artists that I can think of as examples of this are Elliott Smith and Andy Shauf. After being so impressed by Friko’s music I decided that I wanted to do my first full feature/interview about them, which brings me to last Monday at Schubas.

Their show was the kinds experience where every song seemed to end too soon. My favorite part of the set was their encore song “Love You Lightly” (also sadly unreleased). I’m not even sure if they had planned to play this song but in my opinion it was the best part of the show.

You know when you hear a song and there’s one part of it that just makes your head go ???? Sometimes its the chord progression on the harmonies - it can be hard to tell - but this song had that thing. When they got to this part of the song the crowd collectively went o O o h. This was the first time I’d ever heard a crowd have an audible reaction to one of those moments, which was very cool to experience.

I don’t speak this highly of many artists, but I genuinely believe that Friko is going to be extremely successful in the future. If you don’t believe me then you might as well go follow them and find out.

So if you feel like dancing, or if you feel like crying (or maybe a little bit of both), Friko is the band for you.