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When Fcukers booked their debut concert at Baby’s All Right in Brooklyn in March 2023, they had understandably low expectations for the evening. The electronic act had uploaded their first two songs literally hours before they took the stage, and they’d already logged many frustrating years in separate indie-rock bands that imploded before most people knew they existed.
But producer Jackson Walker Lewis, who also worked as a party promoter, got the word out — and the show turned into a sold-out, buzzy event. “It became this loud and rowdy dance party,” says lead singer Shanny Wise. “My friend got onstage and got naked. It was so different to any show I’d ever played before.”
Within months, Fcukers found themselves playing gigs in London and Paris, inking a deal with Charli XCX’s booking agent, and racking up millions of Spotify plays for songs like “Bon Bon” and “Homie Don’t Shake” that fuse house music with dub reggae and pop in bold and adventurous ways.
As a kid growing up in early-2000s Los Angeles, Lewis gravitated towards vintage acts that his father loved, like Devo, Madness, Adam and the Ants, Lush, the Verve, and Brian Jonestown Massacre. He messed around with a couple of high school bands, but didn’t get serious about music until he enrolled at Vassar and formed a band called Spud Cannon with Ben Scharf and other buddies. They cut three albums and toured relentlessly, but made virtually no money and faced miserable, cramped conditions whenever they toured. “I remember the moment I quit,” says Lewis. “My exact words were, ‘I don’t believe in this music.’ I just felt like I had outgrown it.”
Right around the same time, Wise was feeling similar frustrations with her indie band, the Shacks. They’d been her musical home since she was a teenager, but Covid hobbled the momentum they’d started to build a few years earlier when she appeared in an iPhone commercial and they landed songs in multiple episodes of Riverdale. “It was just not really what I wanted to do anymore,” she says. “I spent that next year making more electronic songs on my own, just messing around.”
To make ends meet, she was waiting tables at the Moroccan restaurant Cafe Mogador in Williamsburg. Lewis, meanwhile, was bartending at Madison Square Garden, and hating every second of it. “Worst job I ever had,” he says. “You get treated horribly and the tips aren’t good.” A better job at the Lower East Side bar Pianos slightly lifted his spirits, but he found his real solace in a hole-in-the-wall record store near his Brooklyn apartment.
“I used to dig in the bargain bins,” he says. “And I started to dip my toe into house music. It was this whole new world. I would take stacks of records to the listening station and spend hours there. It was where I heard Bob Sinclar, Masters at Work, and David Morales for the first time. That was my education in house music. It wasn’t from YouTube or Spotify or anything, it was picking.”
He started to DJ at parties, which slowly led to him creating his own beats for the pure fun of it. “At the time, I was like, ‘I’m 25, I’m too old to have a music career,’” he says. “‘It’s not going to happen for me. It would’ve happened already. I’ve aged out.’ I was at peace with it.”
But he was part of a loose group of friends who hung out at the trendy downtown thrift store Leisure Center, where he’d occasionally see Lewis, whom he knew vaguely. “One day I see her there and it looked like she’d just come out of a Nineties rave,” he recalls. “I was like, ‘What? That can’t be the same girl from that other band.’ But it was. And she said to me she was bored with the other stuff, and that she wanted to make electronic music, but didn’t know how. I said, ‘I don’t know either, but we’re going to figure it out together.’”
They spent the next couple of months meeting up at Lewis’ apartment and working on songs. From the very beginning, they called themselves Fcukers.“I had a French Connection hoodie at the time,” Lewis says. “To me, the name Fcukers perfectly encapsulated the vibe that she and I were going for, in the sense that we were both like, ‘We don’t give a shit. We’re not going to have a music career. Who cares? We’re going to do exactly what we want.’”
Once they had two songs they firmly believed in — “Mothers” and “Devils Cut” — they booked that first show at Baby’s, and asked Scharf to join them as a live drummer. They walked onstage to find the room packed to capacity. “It was the first time we realized we had something more than us just screwing around,” says Lewis. “It was a proof of concept. People had this look in their eye like they were seeing something different.”
Things moved quickly after that. Their first show got lots of press attention, followed by bigger and bigger bookings, and a new song: “Homie Don’t Shake,” which they built around a guitar sample from Beck’s “Devils Haircut.” (This band really loves “Devils Haircut.” Their previous single, “Devils Cut,” is a clubby cover of the 1996 hit.)“The funny thing is that Beck sampled a Them guitar part on ‘Devils Haircut,’” Lewis says. “So we had to clear the sample with Van Morrison. He owns 50 percent of the song.”
Wise created a video for “Homie Don’t Shake” that is merely her lip-syncing the song into her phone while riding the M15 bus up First Avenue in New York City. It cost not a single penny beyond bus fare, and has been viewed more than 300,000 times on YouTube. “It was a last-minute idea,” she says. “We were like, ‘Shit, what if you just get on the bus real quick?’”
After a show at another hip Brooklyn venue, Market Hotel, they got a chance to briefly meet Beck himself. “The first thing I said to him was, ‘Don’t sue me,’” says Lewis. “He was like, ‘It’s cool.’” The alt-rock legend had a longer talk with Wise. “I asked him what his favorite hobbies were,’” she says. “He told me he liked to watercolor.”
Fcukers spent most of 2024 gigging at clubs and festivals across the world, but it ultimately became too much for Scharf, who quit near the end of the year. The group is now officially a duo, and they use another touring drummer on the road. “Ben always had this idea that he wanted to go back to school,” says Lewis, “especially since he wasn’t an equal member. He was a live member, and it wasn’t financially viable for him anymore.”
It was just a couple of months back that it became financially viable for Lewis and Wise to quit their day jobs and side hustles to focus full time on Fcukers. Next up: a debut album, which they say is in its final stages of completion. “This is the first time in my life I’m getting my entire wage from music,” says Lewis. “To me, that means I’ve made it. Whatever happens next, I’m cool with.”
