Lucky Fcukers

Taken from the winter 24 print issue of THE FACE. Get your copy here.

Where would pop music be if hot white girls hadn’t discovered dub? We wouldn’t have Ace of Base, Britney Spears’s Slumber Party or even Stars Are Blind by Paris Hilton. We also probably wouldn’t have Fcukers, the much-hyped New York duo who blend elements of pop, dance-punk and dub reggae and run it all through the Zoomer house filter, resulting in music that’s sexy, chic, a little gritty and vaguely nostalgic.

Unlike so many other hype bands I ask people about, all my friends seem to agree on Fcukers: the name is a little much, but the music is really, really good. Their best and most popular song, Bon Bon, is so slick and so addictive that I’m able to look past the faux-patois – ​“Go to da streets and I getcha run run”, frontwoman Shanny Wise sings in a delirious baby voice. This is 2am vibe music par excellence. And once you start listening, it’s basically impossible to stop.

The band only kicked off in earnest in March 2023 with the release of debut single Mothers and a dancefloor-ready cover of Beck’s 1996 hit Devils Haircut. Since then, it’s been one long, gorgeous party: DJing for Hedi Slimane, playing live to swimsuit-clad ravers in a rooftop hot tub, tours everywhere from Mexico to Japan and a co-sign from James Murphy, who hopped on a remix of their track Los Angeles within less than a year of Mothers dropping.

When I meet Fcukers ahead of their performance at Fabric for Pitchfork’s London festival, Shanny and her bandmate Jackson Walker Lewis (production, bass, keys) radiate cool that’s at odds with the plasticky floors of their upsetting, windowless Airbnb. Native New Yorker Shanny is smiley in a brown cardigan with oblique cut-outs, while LA transplant Jackson is also smiley in a red and black motorcycle jacket. They’re both starving. Jackson, who knows London a bit, having studied for a semester at Goldsmiths in 2017 while he was doing Economics at New York’s Vassar College, suggests classic Dalston Turkish joint Mangal 1. Good choice.

Over hummus and adana kebab, Shanny and Jackson tell me their band’s origin story – a long, late-night saga that could also function as a guide for your next New York city break. It kicks off in 2022, when Jackson’s scrappy indie pop band Spud Cannon broke up after releasing three albums. ​“I had this weird thing where I was 25 and I was like, ​‘The music career window thing has passed,’” he says, while Shanny blows out little streams of vapour from her Juul as we sit at one of the cramped window tables at Mangal. But he’d developed a love for ​’90s house music and was regularly digging in the bargain bin at Human Head record store near his Brooklyn apartment. By day, he worked at downtown bar Pianos and at night, he DJ’ed at clubs around the city.

Suddenly, Jackson was liberated from the indie rock conventions he’d always adhered to. ​“I felt like in my past life I was trying to fit into moulds that just weren’t quite right,” he says. ​“Like, I’m not Kevin Shields, I’m not Kurt Cobain.”

Around the same time, Shanny was wrapping things up with The Shacks, the vintage soul duo she started as a teenager with her high school friend Max Shrager. That band enjoyed a taste of success: their cover of The Kinks’ This Strange Effect was used in a 2017 iPhone ad, which she starred in, and they released an album on the Big Crown label, Leon Michaels’s home for nostalgia-baiting soul revivalists. ​“We just wish we were born in the ​’50s,” Shanny told Interview Magazine at the time. ​“It was a great experience,” she says now. ​“Honestly, I was young, and looking back on it now, that’s like, baby [stuff]… I’ve definitely grown musically and personally from that style, but I still think of it fondly.”

Shanny and Jackson had a lot of mutual friends, and before they were acquainted they would spot each other at hole-in-the-wall vintage spot Leisure Centre, where Shanny liked to shop and Jackson liked to ​“sit on my butt drinking day beers before going to work”. Shanny was co-running a Lower East Side restaurant named Betty. ​“An opportunity kinda came my way, and I was like, ​‘OK, I’ll try it,’” she explains, shrugging. ​“But, too much work.” There, they were properly introduced by a mutual friend while Shanny was bartending.

Impressed with her vibe and intrigued by her musical background, Jackson showed Shanny an early instrumental demo of the future Fcukers track Homie Don’t Shake that he’d made at 2am that day and asked, trepidatiously, if she wanted to work on it with him. ​“I just was incredibly intimidated the whole time – really, I was terrified,” he remembers. ​“I just thought she was the coolest. I still think she’s the coolest.”

It was serendipitous: both of them were tired of making guitar-based music and they’d both experimented with electronic stuff during lockdown. ​“I remember listening to [the Homie Don’t Shake demo] and I was like: ​‘Oh, this is sick! Let’s do it!’” Shanny says. At first, they were just making music for fun and they had no intention of packing in their day jobs. But one day, Jackson’s girlfriend at the time, a painter who ​“was very good at getting stuff done”, gave him an ultimatum: ​“You need to lock yourself in your room and finish something, or you can’t sleep over.” And so, they made the candy-coated house track Mothers. ​“I need your touch just so I can go to bed,” Shanny sings on the hook.

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.“

Shanny and Jackson are closing out the year on a high, joining Aussie party starters Confidence Man on a UK and Ireland tour that includes a date at Brixton Academy, before warming up for LCD Soundsystem at their 12-night residency at New York’s Knockdown Centre. They admit they’ve had to tone down the hedonism and professionalise a little so they don’t blow their big chance. ​“You’ll die [if] you party all the time, you really can’t,” says Jackson. But Fcukers’ mission remains: to make people lose their inhibitions with a sound that’s hot, fun and just a little ridiculous. ​“It’s clubby music,” Jackson shrugs. ​“Play at midnight. There are no rules.”

MAKE-UP Molly Lynch PHOTOGRAPHER ASSISTANT Freya McDonald STYLIST ASSISTANTS Amilia Howells and Maia Burt

Corrections: This article originally stated that Fcukers signed to Ninja Tune in 2023. It also reported that Ben Scharf has production and writing credits across the Baggy$$ EP – the band’s publicist has clarified that this isn’t accurate. The article was updated on 6^th December.