Fcukers Have Built the Night Out Into the Record
On debut album Ö, the New York duo turn house, indie sleaze and decades of club music into something deliberately physical. Dallas gets it September 30.
– JAMBALOO EDITORIAL TEAM
There is very little waiting around in Fcukers songs. A beat arrives, Shanny Wise drops a phrase into it and, before there is much opportunity to consider what just happened, Jackson Walker Lewis has pushed the whole thing somewhere else. The hooks repeat until they stop sounding like choruses and start behaving more like instructions.
That immediacy sits at the center of Ö, the New York duo’s debut album, released in March through Ninja Tune and executive produced by Kenneth Blume, formerly known as Kenny Beats. Eleven tracks move through house, garage, dub, drum and bass and the looseness of late-’90s and early-2000s dance music without turning the record into a survey course.
Fcukers have always understood that references only get you so far. Their early music carried traces of the Happy Mondays, LCD Soundsystem and the point where indie bands discovered that a drum machine could do considerably more than keep time, but Ö is less concerned with demonstrating taste than finding out what happens when those influences are pushed together hard enough.
“L.U.C.K.Y.” barely gives itself two and a half minutes to make its point. “Play Me” builds around a chopped vocal that keeps circling back into the track. “I Like It Like That” takes an uncomplicated sentence and repeats it until the repetition becomes the attraction.
Elsewhere, “Butterflies” pulls toward UK garage while the album’s final stretch gradually eases out of the rush, giving Ö something resembling the shape of an entire night rather than a collection of club singles.
That distinction becomes more interesting live. Despite making music built from the vocabulary of clubs and electronic records, Fcukers have resisted simply reproducing the album from laptops. The songs are performed as a band, leaving room for them to stretch, misbehave and retain some of the physical awkwardness that disappears when electronic music becomes too perfectly assembled.
It also explains why their rise has felt unusually fast without appearing entirely accidental. Fcukers spent their first few years playing rooms where their songs could be tested against actual bodies, and Ö sounds like a record made by people who were paying attention to what happened next.
The Echo Lounge is considerably larger than the small New York rooms where that process started. The basic proposition, however, remains unchanged: put the songs in front of people and see whether anybody can stand still.
