Fcukers: Life of the Party

After doing time in guitar bands, NYC’s Jackson Walker Lewis and Shanny Wise changed tack, channelling their love of electronic music and hedonism to create Fcukers: a band built for good times. Now, on the back of their acclaimed debut album, they’re about to show the world what wide-eyed, after-hours energy really sounds like.

On a balmy Saturday afternoon in the middle of March, Liverpool’s Baltic Triangle is giddy at its first real taste of spring. Billed as the heart of the city’s creative quarter, its repurposed warehouses and factory buildings now host studios and markets, bustling bars and venues, including the second branch of much-fabled live space/record shop the Jacaranda. Outside the latter, punters are idly soaking up the rays on picnic benches in anticipation of a low-key album launch show from New York’s buzziest act, Fcukers.

The duo in question have just arrived from Brighton, the previous stop on their tour, and are relaxing around a conference table in the sterile surrounds of the venue’s green room. For a band as beloved by the fashion crowd as they are by pop legends like David Byrne, Billie Eilish and Charli xcx, they’re impressively un-standoffish in person. Frontwoman Shanny Wise beams a bright “Hi!” – wrapped in a black patent trench that’s enjoyably at odds with the weather – while producer Jackson Walker Lewis leaps up to shake hands, all shaggy Britpop hair, camo combats and vintage Adidas. The truth is, they’re having way too much fun to play it cool. 

Even by hype-band standards, Fcukers’ ascent feels particularly stratospheric. Taking the same magpie-like approach to sleazy indie-dance as the Maison Kitsuné compilations did in the mid-2000s, they’ve long since transcended the raucous, post-pandemic party scene that also spawned downtown DIY stars The Dare and Frost Children. Indeed, within a couple of months of their debut show – at Brooklyn’s Baby’s All Right, back in March 2023 – they were flown to Paris Fashion Week to DJ for Hedi Slimane at Celine.

Three years on, and they’ve played a 12-night residency with LCD Soundsystem and opened arena shows for Tame Impala and Dom Dolla. This summer they’re signed up to play stadiums with Harry Styles in São Paolo – a sure sign that saucer-eyed club catharsis is now viewed as aspirational by the world’s biggest pop stars. “From the outside looking in, it’s like, wow, this has all happened in three years?” Walker Lewis acknowledges. “But, you know, Shanny and I have been playing in bands since we were 15.” 

Fcukers’ story starts on opposite sides of the US. Walker Lewis lived in Los Angeles until he was 18, before moving to Poughkeepsie, NY, to major in economics at Vassar College. Meanwhile, New York native Wise stayed put to study music at NYU, dropping out after less than a year. Both found minor success in guitar bands – Walker Lewis with indie-pop five-piece Spud Cannon and Wise as one half of Apple-approved retro-soul outfit The Shacks – but by 2022, these projects had run their course.

Having moved down to the city some years earlier, Walker Lewis was busy balancing shifts at Lower East Side bar Pianos with various DJ gigs. By his own admission, it was a side hustle he “fell ass backwards into”, filling in on the decks one night when the resident DJ was too wasted to continue. Soon, his Monday night parties became a hot ticket, promising eclectic, vinyl-only sets that served up Nitzer Ebb alongside Jamiroquai, Justice with Misfits, increasingly shaped by his discoveries in the sale sections of local record shops. 

“I remember going to the electronic stacks and realising there was this whole world that I didn’t know,” he recalls. “Growing up, I thought house music was like hotel lobby music, because in LA, it’s all just bad EDM. But when I moved to New York, I saw a friend of a friend DJing house and I just thought it was so dope. 

“So for months and months, I would take stacks [of records] I didn’t recognise to the listening station [in the record store] and listen to every single one. And after a while you’re like, ‘Oh, every time it says Strictly Rhythm, it’s pretty good; every time it says David Morales, the remix is great.’ Armand van Helden became my Michael Jordan.”

Where Walker Lewis grew up raiding his dad’s Anglocentric record collection of Madchester indie, shoegaze, Britpop and trip-hop, Wise had been brought up on rocksteady, R&B and dub. It was these roots that inspired her solo output post-Shacks. “A friend helped me download Logic and showed me how to do the basic shit,” she explains in the same twinkling timbre that has become Fcukers’ calling card. “I was just messing around at home, programming shitty R&B-coded beats.”

Wise and Walker Lewis first met at Leisure Centre, a Lower East Side thrift store where their adjacent friendship groups hung out. Walker Lewis recalls his first impressions with a grin: “I’d seen [Shanny] in there a couple times, and she always looked like she’d just come out of a rave, even at 2pm. I was definitely nervous to approach her, though, because I thought I would have to really talk her into trying electronic music with me.” Wise mostly remembers Walker Lewis’ directness. “He said, ‘What’s up with you and music?’ and I was like, ‘I cut my old band to make dubstep or beats or something.’ And he was like, ‘OK!’”

Unusually, it was a total absence of expectation that motivated their early creative relationship. “We had already done our time in bands, driving eight hours to play to about 20 people,” Wise says, discreetly tucking a nicotine pouch under her lip. “So we were both like, this is purely for fun, and had no plans of putting anything out or even going on tour. We only booked our first show because we were like, if we book a show then we’ll have to actually finish a song.”

They officially debuted in 2023, releasing the sugary house of Mothers, backed up by a buoyant, fidget-house Beck cover entitled Devils Cut, which has since been rubber-stamped by the man himself. But it was the swift one-two of Bon Bon and Homie Don’t Shake the next summer that sent Fcukers truly interstellar – the former boasting an irresistible, dub-inflected groove, while the latter revisited Beck’s Devil’s Haircut, flipping a sampled riff before climaxing in an ecstasy of cowbells and guitar distortion. Both were included on the Baggy$$ EP, which was released on Ninja Tune’s sister label Technicolour in September 2024.

“I don’t think either of us expected to be touring for a year off an EP,” Walker Lewis says, shaking his head at the memory. “It hit in a way nobody expected. And it created this conundrum where the EP was reviewed like it was an album, meaning that when we came to making our actual album, we were facing the pressure of a debut as well as the weight of expectation of a sophomore record.”

It was in this fraught mindset that they went into writing their debut album Ö, in early 2025. “I was an absolute mess,” Walker Lewis shudders. “Suddenly you’re hearing hype, so there’s that added element where people are ready to call bullshit, waiting for you to blow it. And then someone in our team said to us, ‘Your next release is gonna dictate whether you have a music career or not…’ So we were in the studio in New York, and I was just trying to force shit through and nothing was clicking. I hit a point where I was like, ‘Shanny, we need to tell everyone to fuck off. No deadlines.’”

Booked to play Coachella, they headed to Los Angeles early and decided to reach out to Kenneth ‘Kenny Beats’ Blume (Vince Staples, Geese, Denzel Curry), who had DMed the year before, inviting them to stop by his studio sometime. “We were only going to stay for a quick coffee, but we ended up talking for about an hour or so,” Wise recalls. “And then he was like, ‘You guys want to try writing something?’ and we were like, ‘Fuck it, yeah.’”

Walker Lewis continues, “I sat down at the keyboard and I was like, I don’t give a fuck: I have nothing left to lose. And we did L.U.C.K.Y. in that first session. Honestly, those two weeks were some of the most joyful I’ve ever had in my life. Working with Kenny made me fall in love with making music again.”

A party record by a band built for good times, Ö is packed with pop music that plays fast and loose with genre boundaries, blending techstep with turntablism (Play Me), dub with house (I Like It Like That), 2-step with 2000s hip-hop (Butterflies), and blog house with dubstep (if you wanna party, come over to my house). For the record’s final third, things get looser still, with the blissed-out dub of TTYGF, featuring Montreal rapper Skiifall, juxtaposed with Lonely’s dreamy amalgam of R&B and UKG, and Feel the Real’s sunset Balearic chillout with the jazzy, Mr Scruff-like hyperactivity of Getaway.

The way Walker Lewis remembers it, Blume initially struggled with these fusions. “It took him four days to get it,” he laughs. “He was like, ‘Jackson, I know you like surprises when you DJ, but I DJ too, and people don’t like surprises.’ And then there were combos that didn’t work. We tried to do a cumbia/techno thing, and Kenny was like, ‘Alright, now we know.’” Dylan Brady of 100 gecs was another key collaborator, receiving co-production credits on four tracks, including the seductive shimmy of Shake It Up and the Neptunes-esque Beatback. 

Pharrell proved a key reference throughout, particularly the minimalism of his early productions. “What’s brilliant about so much of the Y2K hip-hop stuff, like Hot in Herre or Drop It Like It’s Hot, is that it’s just four elements,” Walker Lewis explains. “Also, throughout, I asked the question, ‘What would Basement Jaxx do now if they were young?’ And I decided they would probably pull on all the music from their youth and recontextualise it. So this album is all about channelling the club music of our youth, as opposed to the EP, which was much more 90s-leaning and maximalist.”

This flab-free aesthetic proves the perfect backdrop for Wise’s two vocal modes: a fantastically deadpan drawl worthy of Miss Kittin, and a sweet yet emotionally distant coo reminiscent of Ladytron. Lyrically, Fcukers largely operate on vibes, with Wise freestyling sounds and then reverse-engineering words that fit phonetically. The results are mantras that embody a mood, rather than attempting to communicate anything particularly profound. 

Having come from rigid, guitar-band backgrounds, they’re still relishing the creative freedom that Fcukers brings. “In previous bands, I always felt like a fraud, which is why I quit them all,” Walker Lewis says. “I think this is why [Fcukers] feels really special – it’s the first thing where I’m like, ‘Yeah, this is me.’” Wise finds her role as ringmaster especially liberating, particularly the opportunity to “be more free and jump around and explore a party vibe”. In truth, it’s a responsibility they both take pretty seriously, even if they have had to tone things down a notch for the sake of longevity.

Walker Lewis laughs, “When we started out, it was pretty headless. I remember one time in London we ended up sleeping under a bridge.” Wise chimes in cheerfully, “The first time I met Beck, I was so wasted I was asking him things like what his hobby was.” (For the record, it’s watercolours.) 

Walker Lewis continues: “It got to the point where we got pulled aside by our management and told, ‘You guys need to get it together, figure out how to tour.’ I mean, I love ecstasy, but now I’ve really got to pick the nights with that kind of stuff… Especially on the road, otherwise I just get sick.” 

Thanks to a rapidly ballooning fanbase, they’ve had to dial back the impromptu DIY gigs too. “Our last one got busted by the cops,” Wise says, still bummed. “We want to stay true to our roots and still throw an underplay every now and again, but it’s about safety first and foremost. We don’t want anyone to get injured at one of our shows.” 

For now, the biggest live challenge they face is how to bring the rave to 70,000-plus 1D nostalgists. It’s a tall order, but you suspect if anyone can teach Harry Styles the meaning of dancefloor hedonism, Fcukers can.