Long-awaited since the 2024 single, “Bon Bon,” Ö delivers with electroclash steeped in house, dub, and hedonism.
Thanks to a breakout hit in 2024, the aptly named Bon Bon, a zesty little acid bomb that crackles in listeners’ ears, the name Fcukers spread across every corner of the music industry. But we won’t fall for that trick a second time.
Whether it’s Shanny Wise with her group The Shacks or Jackson Walker Lewis and Ben Scharf (who has since left the group) with Spud Cannon, all of them had already been chewed up by the music industry’s grinding machine over the previous decade. So there was no chance of succumbing to the lure of a predatory major; in the end Ninja Tune managed to sign this provocative duo with the swaggering nickname.
A Huge Addictive Potential
Behind their blasé expressions, their battered productions, and their DIY-tinged videos, the duo from Downtown Manhattan seems less to be playing a pose and more to be pursuing a genuine anti‑industry stance aimed at fun and creative control, of which their ultra-hedonistic debut album Ö would be the perfect vehicle.
Produced with help from Kenneth Blume (formerly Kenny Beats), whom they’ve crossed paths with on projects for Vince Staples, 03 Greedo, Denzel Curry, Idles, or Geese, the two Fcukers demonstrate on their first full‑length release that they are almost as cool as they look. If it ever starts to sag in its closing moments (Getaway, TTYGF), Ö multiplies the duo’s addictive and infectious potential.
With a sensuality we hadn’t seen from them before, the closing track Feel the Real opens the door to a trip‑hop revival. I Like It Like That orchestrates a meeting between Europop, dub, and Balearic house. The house tracks Beatback and Butterflies resurrect the Neptunes sound crafted by Chad Hugo and Pharrell Williams.
The whole thing, shaken in the electroclash shaker that, even more than the singles like L.U.C.K.Y released as forerunners, finds its perfect illustration in the programmatic If You Wanna Party Come Over to My House. A minimalist, even skeletal hit, straight out of a ghettoblaster disgorging all of the group’s English, Jamaican, and New York influences. Another artisanal banger that they know how to forge.
Ö (Ninja Tune/PIAS). Out on March 27. Touring at the Bataclan, Paris, on June 2 and at Rock en Seine, Saint-Cloud, on August 29.
