Fuck Buttons were riding high on momentum. Revisit any 2013 interview with the duo of Andrew Hung and Benjamin John Power, and it almost always kicks off the same: the 2012 London Summer Olympics. The Bristol experimentalists weren’t exactly going to become rich and famous, but through some glitch in the Matrix (i.e., ceremonies curated by Danny Boyle and Underworld’s Rick Smith featuring a couple Fuck Buttons songs), it suddenly seemed that the music of the group with the name that couldn’t be printed in many publications was going to reach the ears of a lot more people. When their third album Slow Focus came out, 10 years ago this Saturday, it felt like an arrival. Though nobody knew it then, it was also a goodbye.
Power and Hung met in 2004 while attending art school. They soon began collaborating, and then playing live. Early on, Fuck Buttons drew attention for their idiosyncratic blend of post-rock, electronic, and drone, made on anything from Casiotone keyboards to children’s toys. (Hung always had an affinity for finding whatever he could from junk sales.) Their 2008 debut Street Horrrsing nodded to their noise roots, combining screeching sheets of distortion with glittery synths. They followed it up quickly the next year with the beloved Tarot Sport, which turned the sound more celestial. The beats picked up towards the sky; the synths shone brighter; the darkness abated ever so slightly. There was already an arc forming, one that would be completed by Slow Focus.
For Street Horrrsing, Fuck Buttons tapped one of their influences to produce: Mogwai’s John Cummings. On Tarot Sport, they teamed with Andrew Weatherall. Both were instances of the duo having the vision, but not all the technical chops to bring it across the finish line. Slow Focus was the first time Hung and Power produced themselves, and it happened to be an album that was bigger and more intense in every way. When Slow Focus finally dropped four years after Tarot Sport, it felt like a long-awaited culmination.
If Tarot Sport ended with Fuck Buttons firing off into the stratosphere, Slow Focus was the sound of them finding the throbbing core of a cosmic void. Everything about it felt darker, grander. From the very opening, with the primal percussion and smeared synths of “Brainfreeze,” the album announced it was going to be a far more visceral and muscular affair. These songs didn’t float or soar, they convulsed and propelled. Each grabbed you by the throat and pulled you further out, or inward, with them. While many reviews at the time remarked on the duo’s pivot from open horizons to the inner workings of the mind, it was just as accurate to hear Slow Focus as something alien and foreboding, the churn and hiss of ancient secrets unearthed.
Across its seven tracks, Slow Focus continued to broaden Fuck Buttons’ palette. The rhythmic backbone of these songs had become more pronounced, resulting in things like “The Red Wing” — a ping-ponging hip-hop-tinged beat giving them something approaching a catchy single. Though tension and release still played a role in Hung and Power’s songwriting, the songs were now just as likely to keep you throttled in, then drop you into nothingness. Taking up nearly half of the entire album, the pairing of penultimate track “Stalker” and closer “Hidden Xs” illustrated the journey best—both songs cresting higher and higher until a breaking point, not resolving but collapsing into starlit keens. Slow Focus was a weird breed. In many ways it was more fully realized and accessible than its predecessors, but it also could feel inscrutable, pulling you in with an unsettling seductive force nevertheless.
A lot of people were plenty intoxicated by that force. Slow Focus charted in the UK top 40. It received critical acclaim. The tone of coverage was often fascination and victory, that this weirdo unmarketable group had leveraged their way to prime festival slots and now had a bizarre and unlikely mainstream moment. As far as Hung and Power were concerned, the outside circumstances didn’t change much. They still collected weird instruments. They still got into the room and jammed out their ideas. They discussed how, at this point in their relationship, they were such close friends and collaborators that much of their writing didn’t even include verbal communication between the two of them. Fuck Buttons got in the room, and they chased something strange and beautiful and unnerving together. They’d gotten closer to finding it, and now who knew what their future would hold.
No one really thought the answer would be “no more Fuck Buttons.” Power and Hung each took some time to focus on other endeavors. Power returned to his solo project Blanck Mass and churned out four albums between 2015 and 2021. Last year, he made the surprising announcement that he had joined Editors as a full-time member. (Power had been working with them since the 2018 album Violence, but it was still a plot twist.) Amidst some production work (including for Beth Orton), Andrew Hung began releasing albums under his own name. His latest, Deliverance, is out next month. Late last year, he tweeted confirmation of many Fuck Buttons’ fans long-simmering fears: The band was officially broken up.
In 2013, it felt like Fuck Buttons had so many more places to go. Many eyes and ears were on them, and they had just made the most bracing, ambitious album of their career. Now it’s easier to hear Slow Focus as a logical finale. Their albums form a near-perfect trilogy: from the scrappy and attention-grabbing beginnings on Street Horrrsing, to the vivid bloom of possibility on Tarot Sport, to the mysteries of the ether on Slow Focus. Maybe that was always the endgame. There was nowhere further for them to venture, no answers they could bestow upon us. Just a bristling ocean of shadows, as mesmerizing and enigmatic now as it was 10 years ago.
