Two albums, both self-released, both without a catalogue number, both essentially instrumental — and between them more listener ratings on the main progressive rock reference site than most signed bands of their generation manage. Fren are the strongest argument in this section that the label stopped mattering.

The short version

Fren formed in Kraków in 2017 around the keyboard player Oskar Cenkier and have kept the same four musicians ever since. They released Where Do You Want Ghosts to Reside in March 2020 and All the Pretty Days in October 2022, both on their own, with no label involved at any stage. The music is instrumental; the only voices on either record are wordless, and appear on one track.

Kraków, 2017, and a band with no label

The quartet is Oskar Cenkier on piano, organ, synthesizer and Mellotron, Michał Chalota on guitar, Andrew Shamanov on bass and synthesizer, and Oleksii Fedoriv on drums, percussion and most of the artwork. Cenkier is described in some accounts as the founder and in others as one of four co-founders. Both albums carry the same four names, and everything on them — writing, production — is credited to the band collectively, with no individual composer credits anywhere in the catalogue.

Nobody sings, and that is the point

Neither record has a singer and neither has a lyric. The debut carries no vocal credit at all. The second album carries one, to the band collectively, and it applies to the closing track alone, where a passage of wordless group vocalising arrives in the final stretch. That is the entire vocal content of their recorded work. It matters for how you describe them: they are not a band whose singer left, and there is no language to attribute to anything they have released. Song titles in Polish, of which there are several, are titles in Polish attached to instrumental music.

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Two records, five years, one line-up

The two albums are recognisably the same band working at two scales. Where Do You Want Ghosts to Reside is six pieces in about forty-four minutes, the longest of them twelve. All the Pretty Days is also six pieces, but in sixty-five minutes, and its closer alone runs past twenty-four — more than half the length of the whole debut. The palette does not change: Cenkier’s keyboards carry the melodic weight with a good deal of Mellotron, and the guitar answers rather than leads. What changes is patience, and how much of it the listener is asked for.

The releases that are not albums

Two releases sit outside the two albums and are easily mistaken for them. Heavy Matter, from September 2019, is a two-track release that predates the debut, and both its pieces then turned up on that album, one of them in a studio version. Wiosna, from September 2022, is a two-track EP issued a month before the second album in a hand-finished edition of a hundred copies with linocut prints; its title piece also appears on the album, at a different running time. Neither is a studio album, and a discography that lists four Fren records has counted these two.

Album by album

Two studio albums, 2020 and 2022. Tap either title for its guide.

How a self-released band gets heard

No label, no catalogue numbers, no chart placings, no singles and no sales figures — and a debut pressed in three hundred copies that nonetheless drew 134 listener ratings on ProgArchives, more than most of the signed bands in this section. What did the work was live support slots and the specialist press: they have opened for Caravan, for Stoned Jesus, for The Sonic Dawn and for Virgil Donati’s Icefish, and both albums were reviewed by named critics in the progressive rock press. Neither has ever had a physical release outside Poland; everything reaches the rest of the world as a download.

Where to start

Start with Where Do You Want Ghosts to Reside (2020). It is the shorter, more immediate record, and the one that made the band’s name; ‘Twin Peaks’ will tell you inside five minutes whether this is for you, and ‘Pleonasm’ will tell you whether they can sustain it. Then All the Pretty Days (2022), which is bigger, slower and asks for more, and which ends with the twenty-four-minute piece that is the most ambitious thing they have recorded.

Why they still matter

Instrumental progressive rock is a crowded field and most of it is made by players demonstrating what they can do. Fren are unusual in that the writing comes first and the technique stays out of the way: the keyboards set atmosphere rather than run scales, and the guitar spends most of both albums in a supporting role. They also matter as a case in point — a band with no label, no catalogue number and a three-hundred-copy first pressing reached an international audience on the strength of the record and a set of support slots. Ten years earlier that would not have been possible.

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