John Congleton has become one of the defining producers of a particular strand of indie and alternative rock, and the list of artists who have worked with him reads like a survey of the most artistically serious and formally ambitious acts of the last fifteen years: St. Vincent, Angel Olsen, Frightened Rabbit, John Grant, Swans, The War on Drugs, Mark Lanegan.

What connects the work is a willingness to let complexity stay complex. Congleton doesn’t sand down the difficult parts of a record to make it more accessible. His productions have the particular quality of sounding fully realized, not like something that could have been but wasn’t, or that was pushed in a direction it didn’t want to go.

St. Vincent’s Strange Mercy and Actor, produced with Congleton, are two of the best art-rock records of the 2010s. Angel Olsen’s progression through her middle-period records toward the more orchestral territory of recent work benefited from a producer who understood what she was reaching for.

For Friko, working with Congleton on their sophomore album is a statement of ambition. You choose him when you want to make something that’s as good as it can be rather than something that maximizes commercial appeal. That choice is itself information about what Something Worth Waiting For is going to be.