FEATURE: Spotlight: Fcukers — Music Musings & Such

FEATURE:

Spotlight

PHOTO CREDIT: Ryan Lowry

Fcukers

__________

I have heard them…

PHOTO CREDIT: Sacha Lecca

being championed by BBC Radio 6 Music. I am going to get to some biography that, whilst a little out of date, gives us some background and detail about Fcukers. They are an Electronic duo formed in New York City in 2022. It consists of Shannon Wise and Jackson Walker Lewis. Before moving on, Ninja Tune provide some detail about a duo who are getting a lot of attention and buzz right now:

“If the protagonist of Daft Punks ‘Da Funk’ was walking around the streets of New York City today there’d be one thing playing on his boombox and it’d be three piece Fcukers. Whilst on his journey throughout the Lower East Side he’d probably end up running into members of the band working nightlife jobs as DJs, throwing parties in local bars and restaurants or simply finding the frequency of Manhattan’s beat and locking in.

Fronted by the energetic and enigmatic Shanny Wise (previously of The Shacks) and backed by producer/night life DJ Jackson Walker Lewis. Fcukers have discovered their own new frequency where a history of playing together and in other projects has led them to syncing on a singular vision built around 90s/00s house music, tasteful trip hop, big beat, indie rock and everything in between.

Having played only a handful of shows in their short existence Fcukers have managed to unite New York and now London’s night life scenes for exhilarating parties with sold out shows at Baby’s All Right, Drom, Sebright Arms and The Market Hotel… where music fans consisting of it girls and boys, skaters, models, culture seekers and more congregate to tap into the Fcukers frequency and dance the night away. Their recent performance at Market Hotel proving the hype is building around the three piece with the likes of Beck, Julian Casablancas, Clairo and Yves Tumor in attendance, joining the crowd of NYC’s coolest kids to catch an early glimpse of Fcukers.

Their debut tracks Mothers and Devils Cut are homages to parties gone before them but moreso to the maestros who such parties were built around such as Saint Etienne, Daft Punk, Chemical Brothers, Coldcut, Todd Terry and so many more. Early reception included NYC house legend Junior Sanchez DM’ing the band to remix both tracks… a perfect nod to the forbearers of house music who so carefully built their own frequencies, and ignited a flame for Fcukers to carry onto dancefloors across the globe. They’ve since been tapped on the shoulder by music legends Lol Tolhurst, Budgie, Jacknife and James Murphy to remix their track Los Angeles with the result being an instant dance floor classic reminiscent of DFA’s golden years.

With only two songs released and a handful of shows under their belt, Fcukers have already garnered plenty of attention from tastemaker artists such as Dom Dolla, Avalon Emerson and Jockstrap performing alongside them across the US. Fashion icon and cultural influencer Hedi Slimane of Celine jumped on Fcukers early, flying the group out to Paris Fashion Week to DJ their closing party. The attention didn’t stop there with the Vans team flying Fcukers out to perform at the House Of Vans and St. Jerome’s Laneway Festival Stages at SXSW Sydney in October. With a stopover to performing in Tokyo they would achieve the feat of having performed their first ten shows across four continents…unheard of in the modern era of music…maybe ever.

Early praise and radio spins have come from the likes of Apple Music’s Wilko along with BBC 1’s Jack Saunders and Ariel Free with the latter lauding “...really really new this band but getting lots of people very very excited…This one has a real vibe and beat to it, gonna get you dancing”.

With a handful of performances across the globe on the cards for Fcukers to close out 2023 they’ll be busy digging deeper into their crates as they work on new music to be released in 2024 with the stage set for the rest of the world to tune in”.

Like many artists I include in this feature, I have to say that I hate their name. Fcukers is objectively a terrible name and one that is hard to say. Also, if you say it like f*ckers, then you won’t be able to on radio. Luckily, the music compensates for a poor choice of group name! Their Baggy$$ E.P. was released last September. Fcukers are playing a run of amazing dates. They have some U.K. gigs coming soon, starting with Gorilla, Manchester on 25th November. There are some 2024 interviews I am going to include before bringing things up to date. NOTION spoke with Fcukers about their debut E.P., Baggy$$. We also learn about the duo’s inspirations and “making music for the rave and late-night introspection”:

“There wasn’t much of a creative process, Baggy$$ was more of a gut instinct: “We were working at Jackson’s house, then we were like, ‘Should we put out a song? Hmm, maybe soon,’” explains a blasé Shanny. “Then we were like, ‘Oh shit, what if we booked a show? That’ll force us to finish it.’” Engineered by their friend Ivan, who reached out on Instagram and said he’d do it for “60 bucks”, and often written after rolling in from bars and clubs in the early hours of the morning, the project has the chaotic carefreeness of someone spilling a vodka Red Bull on your trainers in a rave.

In terms of inspiration, Jackson and Shanny have pulled from a rich tapestry of dance music. The clink-clanking drums on ‘UMPA’ sounds straight off an early M.I.A record while ‘Heart Dub’ belongs in the second room of your favourite underground club. ‘Tommy’ on the other hand feels inherently New York. After their show in LA, Fcukers found themselves at Los Angeles State Historic Park DJing with Armand Van Helden, the NYC house legend famous for singles like ‘You Don’t Know Me’ and releasing on iconic house labels Strictly Rhythm and Nervous Recordings. “Armand is like my Kobe Bryant,” says Jackson, but before settling on dance music, they were individually slogging around in mildly successful indie outfits. Tired of the typical band format, they started working separately on solo material, Jackson was taking cues from The Chemical Brothers while Shanny had been getting into reggae and dubstep.

“I had been working on stuff for a while, recording on my own and fucking around,” says Shanny before pausing for a drag of her cigarette: “When I first met Jackson, I didn’t know he was on the same page but I wanted to try electronic music, so it kind of just worked out.” Luckily, he had an early demo of the growling ‘Homies Don’t Shake’, which Shanny agreed to sing on, bringing surrealistic lines like “Silks real, leathers fake, say you’ll DJ at my wake / Blacked out, show up late ‘cause homie don’t shake” to the raw instrumental. They found themselves in the less formulaic and more spontaneous aspects of electronica but haven’t disregarded guitar music entirely. “I still like indie rock; I still listen to rock bands. I play a couple of different instruments, guitar mainly, but I started to feel slightly restricted. We wanted to try something else, just for fun,” says Jackson.

PHOTO CREDIT: 91 Rules

Over the years, the cross-pollination between indie bands and DJs has been palpable. Back home in the UK, inspired by heady nights at the infamous Haçienda and the northern free party scene, bands like Happy Mondays were colliding indie and rave to make something entirely their own. An explosion of pills, thrills and collaborative possibility infiltrated British music: DJs like the late, great Andrew Weatherall started working with Primal Scream and Paul Oakenfold remixed hits from bands like The Cure, The Stone Roses and Massive Attack.

It’s part of the reason for the connection between New York and the UK’s music scene. Until New Order visited The Big Apple in the early ‘80s, their releases were overshadowed by the post-punk of Joy Division. A trip to the iconic discotheque Paradise Garage inspired the disco and electro elements of their subsequent music and convinced them to invest in a new venture, opening the Haçienda with their label Factory Records. “Even The Chemical Brothers used to be called The Dust Brothers because they were so heavily influenced by the US duo of the same name,” acknowledges Jackson. “There has always been an artistic dialogue between us. That’s what I love so much about dance music, it’s about the exchanging of ideas, theft and doing your version of someone else’s thing. In other genres, it’s like, ‘Oh, you ripped us off’, but in dance music, the whole idea of ‘ripping off’ is the pretence, you know?”

Although New York continues to change, Fcukers are constantly finding new ways of using its spaces. From playing in unfinished swimming pools to throwing their EP launch party in an empty dim sum hall, the band prefer venues that are, well, not strictly venues at all. This is part of a blueprint that has undoubtedly made them one of the city’s most exciting and unpredictable acts. As Jackson explains, they don’t announce their shows until days before and rarely adhere to a traditional gig format. “When I used to throw parties as a DJ, you couldn’t announce it a week in advance because people would forget. When we started the band and wanted our gigs to operate like parties, people were like, ‘What are you guys doing?”, but the spontaneity has played into their hands, and as an act looking to challenge what a band can be, it means they have a greater connection with their audience.

“I think there’s this preconceived notion that if you’re a band, you have to play at somewhere like the Shacklewell Arms, the Sebright Arms or wherever: the curfew’s at 11 pm, you have a pint and then everyone goes home. But because we have these dual backgrounds between indie and dance music, we realised that the rules don’t need to be so strict. No one is stopping you from starting a show at 10 pm and performing at midnight, having DJs play before and afterwards. From the very first show, we’ve made sure all of them feel like parties”.

PHOTO CREDIT: Eimar Lynch

I love reading about their origins. How Fcukers have grown from this humble and promising duo – well, actually a trio at one point – and transcended beyond New York. Now a global act with demand around the world, you wonder just how far they can go. FACE spoke with Shannon Wise and Jackson Walker Lewis in December last year. Going back to the earliest days of Fcukers:

“In March 2023, Fcukers played their first show at Williamsburg venue Baby’s All Right. Their live set-up – with ex-Spud Cannon drummer Ben Scharf behind the kit, Jackson playing bass and keys and Shanny raving onstage with the mic – appealed to indie kids and clubbers alike. Shanny loved the feeling of fronting a dance act. “Having gone from playing every show singing really soft and it’s really chill, to jumping around and everyone’s dancing and cheering and stuff… I was just like: ‘Oh, interesting! Maybe we should play another show.’”

Then, looking to NYC’s wild post-pandemic party scene, they realised they didn’t want to just stick to the traditional indie rock circuit. “You could book a dim sum hall and play at midnight,” Jackson says. “People are like: ‘Oh the shows are so interesting.’ Well, yeah. But in the party sphere, it’s a more common thing to do.”

One month after the Baby’s show, the band got a DM from a scout for Celine. Hedi Slimane, then the French fashion house’s creative director, wanted to shoot them in New York for his legendary Rock Diary, a long-running series of black and white photo collections on super cool indie kids. “I was like, this is really surprising, because we are so not his vibe – we wear baggy pants,” says Jackson. Hedi Slimane cancelled the day before, but Shanny, who didn’t get the memo, turned up for the shoot anyway. (“I think I was, like, drunk when you texted me,” she says to Jackson). But a month later, all was forgiven when Celine flew Fcukers to Paris to DJ the label’s closing party for fashion week.

Keen to capitalise on the impromptu Europe trip, they DM’d everyone they knew in London hoping to put on a show, eventually playing the basement of East London pub the Sebright Arms. “I didn’t have a place to stay,” Shanny remembers of that July 2023 gig. “We played the show the first night, I left my shit at the venue, went out partying and woke up on the couch somewhere the next day.” The London trip was unglamorous, but memorable. They played bongos while tripping on mushrooms at an afters hosted by a member of Black Country, New Road. At the beginning of 2024, Fcukers joined BC, NR on the roster of the Ninja Tune label, which released their debut EP Baggy$$ in September.

Except, wait. Isn’t there something missing from this? Eagle-eyed readers will have noticed that Fcukers used to be a trio. As well as playing drums live and doing press with the band until very recently, Ben has a writing credit on Homie Don’t Shake. Now, all of a sudden, Fcukers are a duo. Jackson tells me that Ben quit the band to go back to school: “He always wanted to be a doctor”. With Fcukers, he says that Ben was “kind of along for the ride”, and that “those six months when we were meeting up in the studio, [it was] always [Shanny] and I. He was never a studio member.”

Jackson groans when I mention a quote from the band’s NME cover story (Ben said that Spud Cannon was “some nimby kimby indie rock bullshit” that he and Jackson “grew out of”). “I wish [Ben] hadn’t said that, because I don’t feel that way – I like indie rock. I don’t feel that way at all.” Shanny, who said in the NME interview that she was “over indie shit” when she joined Fcukers, clarifies her stance: “I don’t really want to hang [shit] on anyone’s music. It’s all just music and expression”.

There are a couple of other interviews I am including before finishing this feature. It is no surprise that many were hyping Fcukers last year. As DORK write in their introduction for Fcukers, “New York’s wildest electronic duo turned spontaneous chaos and couch-surfing into their ticket to stardom”. Their story and rise is pretty amazing. If you do not know much about the duo, then make sure you follow them and check out their music:

“Of course, playing shows around the world is one thing, but you also need the tunes to pack in the suitcase. On the back of their early handful of singles, including remix-fodder ‘Mothers’, this year saw the release of their debut EP ‘Baggy$$’. Made up of a handful of tracks that neatly introduce the pair’s house-loaded inspirations and influences, if the raw-eyed, certain-look artwork didn’t give it away, then the immediate wall-trembling, dust-off-the-shelves rapture-inducing, sing-along igniting ‘Bon Bon’ should give a swift indicator that Fcukers are here to wake you up.

But there’s more than a rabble-rousing round of one styling.

“We felt like it was a fun sampler of our range, where we don’t just make house music,” Shanny explains. “We like a bunch of different kinds of music, and we like to fuck around with a bunch of different styles. So, here you go, here’s some different styles.” For instance, ‘I Don’t Wanna’ smokily oozes a reggae dub heart, while ‘Tommy’ follows this thread to a darker end as it radiates bass with the ferocity of an atom bomb. But there still exists an ease at which Fcukers can electrify with their infectious hooks throughout the head-rush-inducing run of ‘Bon Bon’, ‘Heart Dub’, and ‘Homie Don’t Shake’.

While there are no concerns about being pigeonholed, or at least avoidance of, they are keen to prove that they have a lot more going on. “Stuff that I listen to isn’t always house,” Shanny explains. “It’s a lot of dance hall and reggae and trip-hop, so it was a fun opportunity to showcase that.” It’s helped Shanny’s confidence, too. “Fcukers just feels different, and it’s another side of myself as an artist that I haven’t tapped into as much before,” she smiles. “It’s made me encourage myself to keep trying new things with music and making all different kinds of stuff.”

Having made tremendous strides, there’s no stopping this vibrant wave of energy. Even with all of the opportunities they’ve hungrily gobbled up, it still doesn’t change anything. Fcukers’ only agenda is to have a good time. Currently working on their debut album and other live shows that Shanny remains tight-lipped on (“Jackson will kill me,” she laughs), 2025 looks set to be even stronger. “We’ve been continuously working on music this whole time,” says Shanny. “We have about maybe fifteen to twenty demos and some of them will probably be on there, and then we’re still writing a bunch too.”

But even that seems like a bit too much of a plan. For Fcukers, it’s still most important, above all, to get lost in the noise – their own and in the night ahead. Let’s see where it takes them”.

I am going to end with this feature that was published in May. It collated artists who are getting Gen Z off of their backsides and into the crowds. These musicians who are making music so compelling. I have given Fcukers a hard time for their name. However, when you consider their music and what they are doing right now, you can forgive them that!

“That kind of physical release is in demand. The New York–based duo Fcukers, who make guitar-tinged dance music, have grown a fan base through live shows and word-of-mouth hype. Vocalist Shanny Wise and guitarist-producer Jackson Walker Lewis played in separate indie rock bands for years; then Lewis recruited Wise to add vocals to his ’90s dance tracks. In 2023, they played their first live show at Brooklyn’s Baby’s All Right. It sold out. “It was at midnight, we were all fucked up, and everyone was just partying,” says Wise. “A&R people were like, ‘How does this band get all these people to their first show?’ ” says Lewis. Their rise has been propulsive. They were handpicked by Hedi Slimane to DJ a Celine party and have collaborated with LCD Soundsystem’s James Murphy and MGMT’s Andrew VanWyngarden. Their debut album is in the works”.

There is a debut album coming fairly soon. For the moment, try and catch Fcukers if you can. I am fairly new to their music but, after hearing them played a lot on BBC Radio 6 Music, I have become invested. This year has been a busy one for Fcukers. I think that next year will be more eventful and successful. The duo of Shannon Wise and Jackson Walker Lewis are bringing joy to people…