NOTION The Artists Vol. 1: Fcukers

Redefining what a traditional band looks like, Shanny Wise and Jackson Walker Lewis as Fcukers are reigniting New York’s club scene. Off the back of their electronic traversing debut EP, Baggy$$, the duo talk inspirations, performing in unused spaces and making music for the rave and late-night introspection.

Disappointingly, they hadn’t hit the town before our interview, but they’ve got every right to look slightly jaded. Originally cancelled because of a police intervention, they just got back from playing a rescheduled and sold-out date in Los Angeles, touring their dancefloor-stretching debut EP, Baggy$$. Days after our chat, they release the project on vinyl and it sells out instantly. Across six tracks, which adopt varying styles of electronic music, from trip-hop to big beat and breaks to house, the duo invites you to their party, which is becoming notoriously hard to get into. If you waft through the cigarette smoke and long hair, you’ll find 19 minutes of rave anthems 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.

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?”

If you live in New York, or are aware of the city’s creative scene, you’ll have heard about Dimes Square – an area on the Lower East Side between Canal and Division Street. During the pandemic, it became a hang-out spot for artists, writers, DJs and skaters to meet under lockdown rules, throw parties and exchange ideas. If you were making electroclash, indie rock, alternative pop or any other sub-genre bracketed under New York’s ‘indie sleaze revival’, you probably found yourself there, sitting outside cafés and enjoying the regulated company of others. Although their music doesn’t fit in any of those categories, Fcukers’ presence can’t go unnoticed. The scene isn’t as strong as it used to be, but out of the ashes has risen artists like The Dare, Blaketheman1000 and a host of others going on to do great things. “I tend to avoid it these days just because I was really in it for a while, the neighbourhood has changed so much,” reflects Shanny. “The passport place where we got the photos done for our first single, ‘Mothers’, was basically in Dimes,” interjects Jackson. “We live right by there, it’s where we get coffee, the clothing store Shanny works in sometimes is there. But I agree, I think it’s blown out. Being a block away is just fine,” he laughs.

The music video for ‘UMPA’ perhaps shows a more authentic side of New York. As with all of Fcukers visuals, it was directed by Shanny. I wrongly presume that it was filmed while they were playing a show in Japan just over a year ago, but she corrects me that it was captured in Jackson Heights, a neighbourhood in the borough of Queens. Encapsulating the area’s rich diversity, the trippy cutaways of Asian supermarkets, restaurants and convenience stores tell a story of the city before mass gentrification, which is why the singer feels such a connection with it. “I’ve lived in New York all my life and it’s changed a lot. It’s normal for cities to change but I feel like Jackson Heights is still one of the areas that’s pretty untouched. It captures something I really love about New York, where everything is all at once and together.”

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.

Their chaotic performances have caught the attention of a host of famous faces. With only two songs to their name, they played at Market Hotel in Brooklyn to a crowd that included the likes of Beck, Julian Casablancas from The Strokes, Yves Tumor and Clairo. It was only their third performance in New York, they weren’t signed, but news spreads fast when you’re making an impression. It isn’t just America who want in on the fun; Fcukers have already toured five different continents and find themselves on the verge of supporting electronic-pop provocateurs Confidence Man across their EU and UK dates.

A month after our interview, Fcukers are in London playing at Fabric, one of the capital’s foremost dance spaces, and the city’s coolest twenty- somethings have congregated inside the space’s gothic arches; the energy is visceral. When they finally come on stage, 10 minutes after their start time, Shanny is sporting some rave-ready shades and a Kevin Durant basketball jersey while Jackson blends into his shadowy backdrop in a leather jacket with a bass guitar slacking around his ankles. In her softly-spoken tones, Shanny introduces the band before launching into an unreleased track that snarls with the same psychedelic and addictive basslines as on Baggy$$. For the next hour, everyone is on the same page; every song is greeted with a similar ecstasy and bewilderment; everybody is emboldened by Fcukers’ genre continuum.

It’s easy to look through the ever-rising mountain of rose-tinted articles and documentaries about past raves – particularly from the ‘90s – and presume we’ve never had it so good, but Fcukers have nailed the art of a good night out. “Dance music is just so universal,” smiles Jackson at the end of our interview, when I ask them why their music has managed to resonate with so many. For Fcukers, there was no grand plan, but there never needed to be. Shanny and Jackson make music in homage to rave culture and the freedom of the dancefloor, which you cannot devalue in the times that we live in; there ain’t no party like a Fcukers party cuz a Fcukers party don’t stop.