2 weeks ago
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CoSign is Consequence’s recurring feature series that highlights a rising artist who has captured our eyes and ears with a great new release. On this edition, presented by Lagunitas, we’re celebrating electronic duo and former artists to watch Fcukers on their debut album, Ö.
Ö, the debut album from New York dance duo Fcukers, almost didn’t exist. After months of creative paralysis, mounting label deadlines, and the weight of following an EP that had taken them around the world, Jackson Walker Lewis reached a breaking point. “I’m in a really bad headspace right now,” he told their management. “You might not get any music this year.” Then they met Kenneth Blume — the Los Angeles-based producer formerly known as Kenny Beats — and everything changed.
Lewis and Shanny Wise, the other half of Fcukers, weren’t intending to make an album with him, let alone jump into a studio session. They were in town to celebrate a new publishing deal in between a non-stop touring schedule, and Blume assumed the duo had stopped by mainly to check out his newly-built studio as a potential rental. Neither party was particularly familiar with the other. But then Fcukers played a demo of the trip-hop gem “Feel the Real” for him; Blume, in turn, played them the Geese album he’d just finished. Something clicked. He turned to them and said: “You trying to cook right now?”
In a whirlwind two weeks, Fcukers would lock in with Blume and emerge with Ö, a supremely confident, effervescent collection of floor-filling bangers. Like their breakout 2024 EP Baggy$$ suggested, Fcukers refuse to be pinned down to one style of electronic; throughout Ö, Lewis and Wise move through sugary Drum ‘n Bass and UK Garage, throbbing house, and plenty of Y2K-indebted fare, with a noted influence from Pharrell and The Neptunes, Timbaland, and Basement Jaxx. It is challenging to describe Fcukers’ style and vibe without using the word “cool,” and Fcukers know it — the whole project is built around the idea that great dance music doesn’t need to explain itself.
It’s a philosophy the duo has been quietly sharpening since long before Ö, with both Wise and Lewis having committed multiple years to previous bands before forming Fcukers in 2022. “One thing is no fun,” Lewis says simply, when asked about the band’s refusal to be genre-bound. Still, with only a handful of tracks out before their sessions with Blume last year, Fcukers had some big decisions to make about the musical direction for their first full-length.
Those decisions crystallized quickly once they were in the room with Blume. The sessions, Lewis recalls, were defined less by ambition than by subtraction. Where Baggy$$ had leaned maximalist — layers upon layers, sounds stacked on sounds — Ö was going to be something leaner. “You don’t need stacks and stacks of different sounds,” Wise explains. “You just need one sound. If it’s really fire, that’s enough.” Blume, it turned out, was thinking along the same lines, and held them to it.
But making a standout dance record with such minimal components is not easy either. Luckily, that’s where Wise and Lewis’ backgrounds came in, with a bit more input from Blume. “Dance music is often very repetitive and simple,” Wise acknowledges. “But we both come from bands and from songwriting in that traditional sense. On this album, we tried to remember that this is a song — it’s not a club edit. It’s not just one thing repeated.” Blume pushed them further in that direction than they’d gone before. Lewis recalls the producer’s reaction after finishing several of the tracks: “He said, ‘Man, these are the first Fcukers songs that have an actual verse and chorus!'”
English (US) · 