“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

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.”

This time around, Kapetan was joined in guitar duties by newcomer Korgan Robb. Having a second player to bounce off allowed the band to expand its sonic palette. The result is a fuller, more complex sound that really highlights the band’s biggest strength – its ability to create dynamics that ebb and flow.

While there are moments of quiet-to-loud, Something Worth Waiting For truly shines when the shifts aren’t sudden, but rather build slowly, until a song that started with simple strummed clean chords has built to an all-out fuzzy freakout.

The key to getting the huge tones that define the album turned out to be keeping it small. Alongside their Fender Deluxe and Princeton amps, the duo depended on tiny lunchbox amps to get their outsized sounds. Kapetan and Robb pushed those small amps with some rare pedals from New York-based musical gear wizard Jay Andersen, particularly a pedal designed to emulate the warm, fuzzy tones of a Tascam preamp.

“It’s just a white box pedal with, like, Sharpie on it, and it is the crown jewel of my little ’board, definitely,” Kapetan says.

“If it sounds like we’re really loud, I bet we both have it on,” Robb adds. “Once I got one of those pedals, it was just like, ‘That’s the sound.’ It feels like your amp is about to explode.”

Adding to the explosive sound was Robb’s Red Panda Tensor, a bizarre pedal that allows users to mimic tape loops, with the added bonus of reversing or modulating them, or even just randomizing them for extra chaos.

“I love using loops,” Robb says. “I have a looper as well that I loop in real time, but I don’t loop things to be in time. I loop drones or stuff like that.”

While modern boutique pedals played an integral part in getting Friko’s sound, they went with the classics when it came to guitars. Both guitarists have Jazzmasters in their arsenals, though Kapetan’s is unique; it was pieced together with his dad.

“That’s just my go-to. It’s consistent – and a really good sound.”

• Something Worth Waiting For is out now via Ato.
• This article first appeared in Guitar World. Subscribe and save.

Adam is a freelance writer whose work has appeared, aside from Guitar World, in Rolling Stone, Playboy, Esquire and VICE. He spent many years in bands you’ve never heard of before deciding to leave behind the financial uncertainty of rock’n roll for the lucrative life of journalism. He still finds time to recreate his dreams of stardom in his pop-punk tribute band, Finding Emo.