Say She She’s origin story is so perfectly New York it could have been lifted from a more racially diverse episode of Lena Dunham’s Girls. It involves a “gnarly” eight-floor apartment block on Manhattan’s Lower East Side, a rooftop party turned sing-off and a debut show at Brooklyn’s coolest bar. So it’s mildly disappointing to discover that only one member of the trio still calls the Big Apple home.
“I’m the last one standing,” Sabrina Cunningham confirms as she appears on Zoom, calling from her home in Brooklyn. She’s followed by Nya Gazelle Brown, who completed the band’s recent European tour, including a sold-out show at north London’s 3,000-capacity Roundhouse, while seven months pregnant. “I moved to Maryland over Covid,” Brown says. “I needed to stretch out and I wanted to be around family.” The last to arrive is London-born Piya Malik, who now lives in Los Angeles. “We are just very nomadic,” she says.
It was in LA that the band recorded their forthcoming third album, Cut & Rewind, which finesses their unique blend of psych-tinged 70s disco, 80s post-punk and hypnotic three-part harmonies. While their influences – they cite Minnie Riperton, Liquid Liquid, ESG and the Lijadu Sisters as inspirations for the new album – and old-school recording techniques (everything is painstakingly put to tape alongside backing band Orgone) suggest a retro fantasia, their lyrical themes are firmly rooted in the present. “We’re not singing olde worlde stories,” says Malik, by far the chattiest of the trio. In fact, recording sessions for Cut & Rewind, which was created in the gaps between touring, were often a means of collective purging: “It’s all of us together in the room, feeding off of each other’s energy, exchanging ideas, melodies, sounds and politics,” Malik continues. “Bringing humour into the most sordid dark stories of the internet.”
On the shimmery Norma, taken from 2023’s critically acclaimed second album Silver, they rail against the 2022 overturning of the Roe v Wade ruling, while new song She Who Dares opens by imagining a not-too-distant Handmaid’s Tale-style dystopia in which “six hundred thousand women” will be imprisoned for “speaking out of turn” among other “crimes”. The pain is couched in strutting vintage funk and R&B, and by the chorus the song morphs into an anthem “about really empowering other women”, says Cunningham. “It’s like the ones who care are everywhere if you look for them.”
Disco Life, meanwhile, turns the 1979 Disco Demolition Night – a publicity stunt turned riot at Comiskey Park stadium in Chicago, in which records by predominantly Black and queer artists were burned – into a celebration of the titular genre. (Such is their love for disco that their name is a play on Chic’s single C’est Chic, while a surprise message from Nile Rodgers during an appearance on a CBS morning TV show last year reduced the band to tears.)
Keen not to be defined purely as an “issues” band – “You can’t think about and dwell on [the state of the world] 24/7,” says Brown – they are also aware that Say She She’s very existence makes its own statement. “Just being who we are is political,” says Malik, who left a job working with the former Green party co-leader Caroline Lucas to move to New York in 2013 because she couldn’t face another Tory government. “We’re women of diverse backgrounds and women have always been political because there’s never been a time where it hasn’t been contentious to be a woman or a femme. But, no matter what’s going on, we have to push ourselves to remind people of the beauty in this world, too. Music is medicine and we want to contribute to the medicine cabinet.”
The trio bonded over the love of music and a penchant for sharing that love publicly. Having moved to Manhattan from upstate New York straight from graduating high school, Cunningham was in “a bunch of bands, singing back-up [and] singing with friends”. Living above her – in that gnarly eight-floor apartment building – was Malik, who could often be heard not only stomping around at 2am but also singing. The pair became fast friends (“She probably thought: ‘I’m gonna make friends with her so I can tell her to change her shoes,’” laughs Malik), often watching each other perform in their respective bands across the city. Malik then introduced Cunningham to Brown, whom she’d met at a Brooklyn house party that ended with the two of them harmonising on a rooftop.
“Piya walked in all cool with her British style,” remembers Brown, “and I was just like: ‘Who are you?’ Within seconds we were singing at each other. Then it went to singing at each other out at brunch or, you know, anywhere.”
Say She She’s official formation was stalled slightly by the fact that each member was finishing other projects. They also didn’t have any of their own songs. Not that it stopped Malik, who signed them up for their first gig at Barbès, a cool musician hangout in Brooklyn, in 2018. “We hadn’t quite convinced Nya to join the band yet,” explains Malik. “She was working on solo stuff and we were like: ‘Come on you can do it.’”
They got a third singer to fill the gap, meaning Brown was in the audience to watch her soon-to-be band’s debut gig. She was also being watched herself. In the crowd to catch brass experimentalist headliners Slavic Soul Party! was a certain Robert Plant. “Obviously, he wasn’t there to see us,” laughs Malik. “No one knew who the hell we were. And he was definitely staring at Nya the whole way through the show.”
From there, the band recorded a clutch of songs during the pandemic that would eventually emerge in 2022 as their more lo-fi and soft-focus debut album, Prism, in 2022. A year later came the richer Silver, which earned them an appearance on Later … With Jools Holland, five-star reviews and a reputation as a live tour-de-force. Malik remembers a moment performing Norma during an all-ages show in the US in front of “a sea of girls and it was just so amazing to see all these young teenagers screaming and shouting the lyrics with us”. The show at the Roundhouse was also a big moment, especially for Malik, who went to school not far from the venue in Camden Town. “It was life-changing,” she says.
Malik’s smile suddenly fades. While the shows were a success, she claims they didn’t make any money from the tour and “had to pay all the expenses”. She says they were reticent about bringing it up, fearing the negativity would distract from the music, but she’s clearly fed up. “The things that have happened to us in the music business are shocking and it’s important that people realise it’s happening from all angles.”
With this album, Say She She are keen to put themselves out there more and more, be it in interviews, or in how their art is presented. While the cover art for their first two albums featured abstract images, Cut & Rewind is adorned by a photograph of the trio in stylish power suits staring down the camera. “When we started, we were conscious of being women who were trying to use our bodies, or our sexuality, or our identity, to push something,” Malik explains. “We didn’t want to be objectified – we wanted to be taken seriously as artists.” But it also felt like hiding, something Say She She will not do. “Now it feels political. Now it’s like: ‘Hey, we’re not going to be invisible.’” The band nod in unison, that New York confidence never far from the surface.
Cut & Rewind is released by drink sum wtr on 3 October. Say She She tour the UK and Ireland from 21 to 26 November; tour starts Oxford.
