Interview by Matteo PiniPortrait by Jeton Bakalli

MP I interviewed you exactly two years ago when your single “Bon Bon” was first making headway, and you both said that you were the brokest you’d ever been in your lives. In the time since, you have played at Glastonbury, Primavera Sound, on Jimmy Kimmel Live! and a sold-out, three-night residency at London’s Colour Factory. You also have your debut album Ö (2026) out on Ninja Tune. How broke are you feeling today?

Jackson Walker Lewis I’m not completely broke…

Shanny Wise I can pay my bills now. Definitely not rich though.

JWL Give it another two years. We might start seeing some money by then.

MP Have you had any, “Mum, I made it” moments of late?

SW In your day-to-day, you get in the flow of things and it feels pretty normal, but we have had standout moments where we’re like, what the hell. The London shows did that for me, as did Primavera: moments that made me feel so grateful and amazed at what’s happened.

JWL Jimmy Kimmel was crazy; it felt like The Truman Show (1998). With big festivals like Primavera, you never know if people will show up in the first place, and we were up against five big bands. We went on stage, and it was packed. I remember thinking, “We’re in Spain right now; I’ve never even been to Spain!”

MP Tell me about the chronology of making this album.

SW We decided to stay in LA after performing at Coachella in April last year. We worked together with Kenny Beats for two weeks: he had us on a regimen of three new song ideas a day. The first week was all new songs, and by the second week we’d decided what our favourites were and refined them. We had to finish it at the end of those two weeks because we were about to go on tour for the whole summer. We didn’t have time to dwell on it or overthink anything.

JWL The first song we wrote for the album was “Feel that Real”, which was the song we played Kenny the morning we met him, then he played us the Geese album he’d been working on.

MP Kenny was wrapping up production on Getting Killed by Geese – widely regarded as one of 2025’s best albums – before you started working together. Did you have any inkling as to how big that record would be?

SW Not at all. The day we met him, he played us some of the Geese songs he'd been working on and we were like, whoa, you’re working on this? We thought he was just a hip-hop guy; it was crazy to see the album come out and blow up as big as it did.

JWL I don’t think even he thought it was going to be that big. The day we met him, he was like, I just recorded this album and it’s pretty weird. He wasn’t necessarily like, “This band will change the game”. I think we had this mutual surprise at one another: we were surprised that he had just produced this weird, interesting album. He thought we just wanted to make “Bon Bon” again.

MP What was your experience bringing an outside producer into the duo?

SW Working with Kenny freed us up a lot. When it’s just us in New York, we could easily spend an hour on a single sound: how should this bass sound? Does the kick drum sound good? Working with him, we know the kick drum is going to sound good. It allowed us to focus more on writing and to write so much faster, too.

JWL He became the third member in a way. His background is in hip-hop production and he opened us up to working super quickly, moving through ideas like you would with a rap song. He’s an amazing conduit of ideas and getting them out of you: by the end of it, you’re like, I can’t believe that was my idea.

MP Did he ever kill an idea you loved?

JWL We had to fight for some shit.

SW We almost killed “L.U.C.K.Y” three times. We made it on the first day we met him, and when we were going through the songs we’d made at the end of those two weeks, “L.U.C.K.Y” got cut. A month later, I texted saying I missed “L.U.C.K.Y”. We went back to his studio, tried it again and it still wasn’t right. Another month later, I was still like, we need “L.U.C.K.Y”! We cracked it after the third time.

JWL There would be times where I’d be over Kenny’s shoulder, micromanaging the Ableton session, and he’d say, “If you come any closer to me, I’m gonna kill you.” [laughs]

MP What musical influences were you drawing on for this record?

SW We were listening to a lot of 2000s club music that we grew up listening to at parties, songs like “Hot in Herre” by Nelly.

JWL People like N.E.R.D. and The Neptunes and OutKast, but also Dizzee Rascal. We were thinking about how we could recontextualise these sounds: we never want to pull from something outright. What interests us is the combination: putting a Neptunes beat over UK garage, or a dub song with grime drums. A lot of the club music from our youth is very minimal production-wise: songs like “Hot in Herre” or “Rock Your Body” have about four elements happening at any one time. Their genius is in the minimalism, and in our conversations with Kenny we wanted to keep a simplicity across the record. Kenny really held us to it: he’d ask us, how can we make this bang with just a couple of elements?

MP That spirit of synthesis is also at the heart of being a good DJ.

JWL I was taught to DJ by my cousin, who was an open-format DJ. One of the first times I watched him, he went from hip-hop to cumbia to Lenny Kravitz in three songs. It never felt weird to me; it led to how we make music.

MP Given how party-forward your music is, have you had to be more disciplined with partying on tour?

JWL In the early days, we were more fast and loose with it. I remember we hit a wall on the first longer tour we did, where we realised we needed to pack it in a bit. I do pick nights, though. I’m an ecstasy guy: last time I did it, we were playing at Making Time Festival in Philadelphia. We had just finished playing and I knew I had to leave somewhere early the next day. As we were packing up on stage, I dropped a pill but I didn’t quite get enough “runway”: you want to have a full night ahead of you if you’re doing pills. It was a very fun two-hour window and then a very painful evening in a hotel room. .