In February 2022, a pair of musicians from downtown Manhattan released an EP called Baggy$$. It was six tracks of drum and bass, garage, and dubstep, recorded as if the whole thing had been done in a single evening and not cleaned up afterward. Nobody much cared. The project was called Fcukers. Shanny Wise and Jackson Walker Lewis were not, at that point, on anyone’s radar.

A few years later, Ö arrived on Ninja Tune, Fcukers’ debut full-length, 28 minutes of sweat and speed that has people talking in a way the EP didn’t. This is how the New York underground works: slowly, then suddenly.

The Fcukers story is not unique to Fcukers. Downtown Manhattan has always generated music before the rest of the world catches up. The no-wave scene of the late 1970s happened in lofts nobody else could afford to notice. The dance-punk and disco-punk explosion of the early 2000s, LCD Soundsystem and DFA Records and the whole extended family, emerged from the same conditions: cheap space, physical proximity, a shared aesthetic developed through repeated nights in the same rooms. By the time those sounds reached the larger culture, the participants had already moved on.

What Fcukers are doing now, and what Ö documents, is a version of that lineage. The album draws heavily on UK dance music traditions, drum and bass, dubstep, garage, the sounds that built British club culture in the 1990s, and rebuilds them through a New York lens that is inherently less reverent and slightly more chaotic. The DJ EZ sample that appears on the record is both a sincere nod to a British legend and a slightly absurdist claim: we know where this came from, we know we’re doing something different with it, here is both things at once.

The context matters. New York has spent the past several years in a particularly interesting moment for underground dance music. The consolidation of streaming has made it harder for small, scene-specific labels to survive through traditional means, while simultaneously making it easier for music that would have once lived only in record store bins to find international audiences almost immediately. The result is a weird paradox: underground scenes that remain deeply local and physical in character, organized around parties and venues and physical community, but whose output circulates globally in ways that would have seemed impossible twenty years ago.

The Ninja Tune signing suggests that Fcukers have crossed a threshold, from the circuit of downtown parties and small-run releases into something with a broader distribution network and institutional support. Whether that changes the music is the question the underground always has to answer eventually. Ö was made before the deal happened, which may be why it sounds like itself rather than a calculated pitch.

What the album gets right is texture and tempo. There is no wasted space. Each track moves with a purpose that feels earned rather than imposed. The 28-minute runtime is not a limitation but a statement: this is exactly as long as it needs to be. When the music ends, you are not ready for it to be over. That is a hard thing to do, and Fcukers do it.

The New York underground has always produced this. The cycle is long, the timeline between inception and recognition is unpredictable, and the musicians who do it for any length of time do so in the full knowledge that the city that made them might not be the city that rewards them. What they make in that gap is usually the best version of the music. Ö feels like something made in that gap.