Like many artists formed in the post-genre era, Fcukers are better described not by sound, but by vibe. In their case, it’s as irreverent and iconoclastic as the club duo’s confrontational recording name might suggest. Led by the Splenda-sweet vocals of Shanny Wise and the omnivorous production of Jackson Walker Lewis, who also provides keyboard and bass, Fcukers’ beginnings are proudly, defiantly scrappy.

The duo originally met in 2022, at a moment when both artists were disillusioned with the indie scene in which they had spent years toiling away without a major break. (At the time, Wise was juggling hospitality jobs, and Walker Lewis was “playing Justin Timberlake for rent money” as a DJ in bottle clubs and bars around NYC). But upon meeting, their mutual ennui with the industry catalyzed into a free-wheeling artistic approach that would propel them into infamy. “I was like, ‘I kind of quit indie. I want to make dubstep or something.’ Then Jackson played me this beat he made, and asked me if I would sing over it. That beat was so fresh, it was sick,” Wise marvels, referring to the first time she heard the bones of what would later become the single “Homie Don’t Shake.” 

At first, mid-COVID, the artists would meet up without any major expectations, only seeking to creatively experiment. “We’d kind of just mess around and have fun, we didn’t have any plans of ‘Oh, we should put this out,’” Wise adds. Yet, soon enough, they released debut single “Mothers,” and the hype quickly followed. With just one released single, they started on the live circuit and quickly gained label interest: clearly, what they lacked in a back catalogue, they compensated for in magnetism. 

From there, the band began to become known for throwing guerrilla gigs in disused NYC locations like an abandoned dim sum restaurant and an unfilled rooftop pool. The duo’s energetic stage persona and DIY ethos appealed to a party-hungry zillennial audience, even when they had next to no tracks on Spotify. “We came from the underground in New York,” Walker Lewis explains. “Our first eight shows in New York were all DIY.” However, Fcukers wouldn’t stay a secret for long. The band’s bombastic entry onto the scene quickly gained co-signs from industry greats, including LCD Soundsystem’s James Murphy and legendary rocker Beck. “There’s so many DJs and artists who really supported us since day one, really backed us,” Walker Lewis adds, his arch tone switching, ever-so-briefly, to reverence. 

No doubt, this kind of artistic validation helped the band make inroads; but so did the wider cultural context of their come-up. Riding the wave of the so-called “indie sleaze revival”—again, less of a cohesive movement, more of an energy, a hark back to the down and dirty days of Myspace, ragers, and nu-rave upstarts—the band’s bass-heavy synthesis of club sounds, expressed via the live vocals and instrumentation of their shows, seemed to have hit the zeitgeist. But as much as Fcukers’ nascent fans were looking for some kind of catharsis, so were the band themselves. “[Performing] has been really freeing compared to my old band, where I was just singing super softly and playing my bass, I had to be really still and kind of stiff,” Wise explains. “It’s good to be able to jump around on stage and have fun with it.”

In 2024, Fcukers wound up signing on the Technicolour Imprint of Ninja Tune: a legendary British dance music label and trip-hop pioneer founded by experimental duo Coldcut. For Fcukers, it was an indicator that their lo-fi, unconventional project had graduated from the kids’ table. “I think Ninja Tune is a kind of stamp of approval. For us to be a newer [project] and to get that [recognition] is significant,” says Walker Lewis. There’s also the personal significance of the label to the producer’s own musical formation. “I’m a huge Coldcut fan, I used to spin Coldcut records [as a DJ] and I still remember the first time I heard ‘People Hold On’ and ‘True Skool’ with Roots Manuva, they’re just dope to me.”

Shortly after joining Ninja Tune, the band released “Bon Bon”— a woozy slice of summer, bathed in atmosphere, which became the official gun-fingers soundtrack to festivals across the US and EU, as well as to 20-somethings getting baked in their local park on sun-scorched grass. What followed was the EP Baggy$$ which, in a full-circle moment, featured “Homie Don’t Shake,” the song built from the beat over which Wise and Walker Lewis first bonded. Harking back to the open-air parties of turn-of-the-millennium London, the project’s dub and dancehall textures recalled legends like Groove Armada and Basement Jaxx; acts whose bolshy attitude and international palette reflected the newly globalized age of the late 1990s and early 2000s. 

However, the Caribbean inflections of Fcukers’ work naturally gives pause to anyone who has been around in the scene long enough to see the rise, fall, rise, and fall again of such slice-and-dice approaches to diasporic sounds from white artists. Yet Wise underscores that the artistic choice isn’t just a cheap grab for novelty. Instead, in a moment of sincerity, she highlights her long-running interest in these genres; ones that can be traced back to her earliest musical explorations, and points to the sonically fluid nature of growing up in NYC. “My mom would listen to a lot of Bob Marley and when I was in my first band [The Shacks], I was listening to a lot of obscure soul and doo-wop, then rocksteady [a precursor to reggae],” she says. “Growing up in New York, I was exposed to so much music from around the world at a really young age. You can be in the subway and a mariachi band is there, or you can go into a deli and there’s a Bollywood soundtrack playing.”

The band’s Baggy$$ era saw them play at Barcelona’s Primavera Sound festival and appear at mega-festivals Coachella and Glastonbury, as well as being tapped by Berlin disruptors Live From Earth to DJ Berghain’s Panorama Bar; moments that, for any touring DJ or club act, could be considered the pinnacle of a career. However, as they release their first album Ö, the stakes are even higher. While the promo cycle has seen Fcukers perform on The Tonight Show Starring Jimmy Fallon (which Wise admits was “surreal”), it’s the behind-the-scenes that really shows how the duo have leveled up: the album features production credits by Kenny Blume, the prolific producer who has collaborated with the likes of FKA twigs, JPEGMAFIA and, most recently, Geese. 

While Fcukers have been accused (notably by Pitchfork) of lacking ambition, instead just stumbling into success, it’s clear that Ö is a step up—even if they’d be hesitant to say so out loud. However, there’s a definite switch in sensibility. Fcukers’ genesis might have been in sweaty basement clubs and DIY venues, but there’s a big-room energy here as the band experiments with a slicker style, one inspired by the party greats who dominated the airwaves during their childhood. “We straddle a lot of different things [musically] and with this album we wanted to think about fusion and about taking the club music of our youth, 2000s hip-hop, R&B and club music, and contextualizing it in a new-ish way,” Walker Lewis explains. “Like in the song ‘Play Me,’ we wanted it to draw on drum ‘n’ bass but also have a trap breakdown in the middle, or the track ‘Butterflies,’ which is UKG inspired, but the instrumentals are kind of Neptunes-y.”

Part of this broadening of influences, mixing both the countercultural and the radio-friendly, is an awareness of the billion-dollar scope of dance music: where warehouse parties and free raves have been eclipsed by mammoth showcases with corporate backing. “Electronic music emerged from a subculture but, now, you see artists like Dom Dolla selling out stadiums,” Jackson Walker adds. “It used to be about knowing the history, but that’s less of a thing now, it’s mainstream.”

Yet despite all this—the band’s growing profile, the sanitization of the genre, and even the doom and gloom pressing at the margins of the world at large—Fcukers remain unfussed. Naturally cynical about the industry and ambivalent about planning for the future, they, like all great dance acts, know that all we have is right now. And for these two, the key to staying sane has been making the music that they actually want to hear. “We try to stay true to what we like, what we want to listen to, and what we want to make,” Wise says simply. “That’s the funnest part, it’s still just for us. We both really like that it feels true to us and that we believe in it.”

Photographed by Abi Polinsky

Styled by Talia Cassel

Written by Megan Wallace

Glam: Ryann Carter 

Grooming: Aidan Rodriguez

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