New York trio Fcukers have reawakened the city’s electro pulse. Consisting of Shanny Wise (vocals), Jackson Walker Lewis (bass/keys/production), and Ben Scharf (drums), the group translate a 00s electro-indie frequency through the city’s grid – packing out venues with a new generation wanting to get lost in live dance music. “We would meet up maybe once or twice a week,” Lewis says, recalling the group’s early days. “Shanny would go to a rave, and I’d DJ for two nights straight. Then we’d come back like, ‘I’m feeling this beat right now.'” This lifestyle is Fcukers: raw, hypnotic and totally addictive. 

As part of a burgeoning scene tapping into and recharging electronic music, Fcukers have already sold out shows in New York, London, Tokyo and Paris. Early attention came from NYC house legend Junior Sanchez who remixed the group’s first two releases Mother and Devil’s Cut (a cover of Beck’s Devil’s Haircut) – both tracks completed only after the group booked their release show. Their most recent track, Bon Bon, is a certified dancefloor banger with a refrain that will screw into your mind – ‘I getcha bon bon‘. This, alongside lo-fi anthem Homie Don’t Shake, will both feature on their upcoming EP, Baggy$$ (out September 6 via Ninja Tune’s Technicolor imprint). We spoke to Fcukers about their upcoming music, the beginnings of the band, and the art of a good night out. 

J.L. Sirisuk: Growing up, where did you like to go out for gigs or just to have a good time?
Shanny Wise: I would go to a lot of DIY grungy Bushwick shows, and raves and stuff.
Jackson Walker Lewis: LA doesn’t have a house music scene, there’s no heritage for that. [Jackson is from LA] It’s very punk and EDM. I used to go to this club called The Echo and they have the Echoplex underneath. They had this night on Sunday called Part Time Punks, and it was the one eighteen-plus club night there was. I wasn’t really into electronic music growing up. I got into it later. My dad raised me on shoegaze, but also on Joy Division, New Order and all that stuff. I remember the first time I heard Joy Division’s Transmission on a club sound system, with the bass jacked up. That was like the big moment everyone has in their life where it’s like, “Oh, the power of a nightclub.” You’re fully entranced.
Ben Scharf: I grew up in Worcester, Massachusetts. The thing about Worcester is, there’s not a lot to do there. In terms of electro, it was really attached to festivals. A group of friends and I every summer would go up to Osheaga music festival in Montreal. There was one year where the Chemical Brothers were headlining, and I’m embarrassed to say that at the time I didn’t know who they were. I was like, “Who are these people at the top of the bill?” But I became a fan, diving in and falling in love with dance music.

JLS: Now you’re all in New York, you had separate musical projects previously, so what brought you together as Fcukers?
JWL: Ben [Scharf] and I had played in this other middling indie rock band for years that did the whole “tour in the van down in the south” kind of thing and played for twenty people a night. Towards the tail end of doing that, I had started DJing in the city and getting booked a lot. I’m doing that full-time for money right now, but I was getting into 90s New York house because I was vinyl DJing at the time and that’s what was in the bargain bins at the record store. It was super cheap. That was kind of my education, digging through the crates, super old-school style. I’d take full racks to the listening station, listen through and gradually over time I discovered things I liked and figured out labels that way. Ben and I quit our old band around the same time. We were the first ones to quit. Ben tells it better…
BS: You were trying to track vocals for this one song, and it became evidently clear to both of us that the song wasn’t going to hit like we wanted, so we were all frustrated. That night, Jackson and I left the studio together and went back to our practice space like, “Fuck it. Let’s start playing some dance beats” – just to decompress and prove to ourselves that we can do something that’s fun and hopefully sounds good. After that, it was just like, “Let’s make house music. Let’s do it.”
JWL: We had no clue what we were doing. I kind of stormed out like a drama queen from that recording session, got into a big fight with the three other people in our band, and we were like, “Well, fuck it. Let’s just go do that thing we’ve always been saying we’re going to try.” Months after we started to be like, “We should do something just for fun. Just for us,” not trying to have a music career or anything like that. We were super jaded. Shanny [Wise] and I had a mutual best friend, and even though we didn’t know each other we shopped at the same thrift store in New York a lot, so I had seen her there and knew of her for a while.
SW: We met up, and you’re [Lewis] like, “So what’s up with you and music, and stuff?” I was like, “Dunno. I’m kind of over this shit. I just want to make beats or dubstep or something.” You made this beat and played it for me from your phone speaker, and you’re like, “Would you want to sing on it or work on it?” And I said, “Hell yeah. Let’s do it.”
JWL: I had this shitty French Connection UK hoodie that I’d thrifted and I was like, “We should just call the band Fcukers.”

“People were singing Bon Bon, and I was like, “Oh, shit. This is lit.””

JLS: You released two songs initially, Mothers and Devil’s Cut. What was behind those two songs?
JWL: We weren’t rehearsing as a band, we were just making music on the laptop or whatever for months. Those weren’t the first two songs we made, we were dicking around on a lot of different kinds of stuff, trying to find our direction. Shanny had said, “Our gut will tell us when the time is right to release something.” It was six or seven months in, we started writing Mothers and we had this communal gut instinct that [that] was the one we should put out. Then we set a deadline before we finished the song. We’d booked the release show a month out, so we were like “It’s got to be done!” That month was crazy. I don’t think we slept very much because our friend Ivan [Berko] co-produces and he’s fully nocturnal. He’s a bartender guy and wakes up at 2pm. At that time, he was waking up at 4pm, so if we wanted to go to his crib and work, the shifts were from 10pm to 5am. It’d be like, go there, do that, go home, sleep a little bit, go to work, get off DJing, go to his apartment and work until 7am on stuff because there was a mad dash to finish. But Devil’s Cut, I remember I was super stoned one night like, “I love Devil’s Haircut so much. I wonder if someone’s done a remix because I want to play it.” I couldn’t find a good remix of it. The lyrics flowed over this one beat we had, and then we kind of just did it that way.

JLS: Each city has its own music history, like Chicago has the architects of house music, and Detroit with techno. You’re creating some magic right now…
JWL: New York didn’t invent any of those things, but it still had its scene in the 90s and also hip-house and like Todd Terry and Armand Van Helden. He was here, Junior Sanchez who did the two remixes for us, and David Morales and all those New York 90s house-heads. There are a lot of cultural points that have become a little lost or glossed over in the history books that I think are so important. The Hacienda in Manchester only happened because New Order visited New York, and they saw Paradise Garage and the gay clubs and were like, “Why don’t we have a nightclub in Manchester?” There was a lot of influence, even up until the indie sleaze thing in the early-2000s, the city has a lot of history and touchpoints and I wouldn’t be bold enough to say we’re carrying the torch, because we’re not. I think shedding light on that stuff is important and cool. There’s a dance history in New York that sometimes gets lost.

“I remember the first time I heard Joy Division’s Transmission on a club sound system, with the bass jacked up.“

JLS: I was listening to the EP last night and had a sudden desire to go out. You bring so much energy to the tracks – tell me about your creative process.
SW: A lot of times Jackson will make a beat and then we just start with that and sing over it and see how it feels. Then we write the words around that.
JWL: Shanny had gone to Jamaica, I remember she came back and the EP ended up on this kind of Caribbean-tinged tip. But there’s also that kind of trip-hop number on there. My dad was really into a lot of trip-hop like Sneaker Pimps, Massive Attack, and Portishead; that’s all the stuff I really listened to when I was in high school, so it was fun to do something like that on there.

JLS: So it was all very go-with-the-flow?
JWL: It wasn’t a situation where we went to the log cabin for two weeks and came back with an EP. It was honestly just over months. One of the songs Homie Don’t Shake, we worked on that for a year. Literally in the studio. Ivan [Berko] who is our co-producer, we would go to his apartment every Wednesday and work. It was fun because instead of doing the log cabin thing for two weeks, it was kind of like you were living with all this stuff. We would meet up maybe once or twice a week. Shanny would go to a rave, and I’d DJ for two nights straight. Then we’d come back like, ‘I’m feeling this beat right now.’”

JLS: Who were some early influences?
JWL: Ben Watt in Everything but the Girl was such a big influence on me because I was never an electronic music producer. I was always a guitar player in bands – this is the first band I’ve played bass for. Watching him and their progression where he went from an incredible guitar player to no guitar. In the later stuff he was like “We’re going to make house and I’m gonna play keyboards.” You could go from indie band to making electronic music.
SW: I like Sublime.
JLS: I like them, too.
BS: Both musically and coming from the perspective of a live show, which is what I was really interested in doing a while back, I saw the Soul Wax documentary Part of the Weekend Never Dies and watching how they were able to do it back in the early 2000s was super inspiring to me. Just putting live house music on stage. Hot Chip, stuff like that, it was all very exciting to me as a drummer.

JLS: You played your first ten shows live across a few cities around the world. Any performances stand out so far?
JWL: Ben and I, and Shanny too, we’ve all done the thing before in previous bands where we know what it’s like to be in a van and show up and play for five people. In this situation, to be in Tokyo with only two songs released, playing to a full room of people who know those two songs, it’s a really special thing. It’s been pretty wild and amazing that there’s anybody who knows the music.
SW: I really liked our last London one, that was really fun for me. People were singing Bon Bon, and I was like, “Oh, shit. This is lit.”

JLS: There’s a great energy behind the music, a real synergy between the three of you. What do you think each of you brings to the project?
JWL: We’re all actually friends. I’ve been in bands before where there are people who have beef. The three of us, because of some stuff we’ve been through, we’re all kind of like trauma-bonded in a way other bands aren’t. I really view Shanny like she’s my sister. It’s one of those things where the sum is greater than the parts. Ben’s drumming is unbelievable – live, he’s a machine. But also influences, we’re all bringing tons of different influences. Shanny, she loves Sublime. She’s into reggae, soul music, Motown, and world music. I like the more house stuff, so I bring that. Ben likes Soul Wax and the Chemical Brothers, it all converges, you know?
SW: I totally agree. You guys are like my family and I feel like we all have a connection and help pump each other up. Support each other.
BS: I would echo that. We were musicians before house music producers. Jackson’s an amazing producer and a great DJ, but he’s a musical person. Shanny rips the bass, you know? So that helped us write songs and song structures which make them pop-ready instead of just beats.
JWL: One thing I’ll add that is important to note, is there’s a lot of stuff nowadays where people are like, “I’m going to do this aesthetic,” or whatever. But this is what our life was like. We were dressing this way before we were doing the Fcukers stuff. It’s what we do, we go out. I was going to bed at like 4:30am all the time before. We are night owls. We are out there in the club, crate digging, hanging out downtown. It is authentic, we’re not trying to be anything we’re not.

Baggy$$ is out September 6 via Ninja Tune’s Technicolor imprint, check out Fcukers on Instagram here.