{"id":117532,"date":"2025-09-06T00:40:09","date_gmt":"2025-09-06T00:40:09","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/117532\/"},"modified":"2025-09-06T00:40:09","modified_gmt":"2025-09-06T00:40:09","slug":"just-being-who-we-are-is-political-disco-trio-say-she-she-on-impressing-nile-rodgers-and-making-bold-protest-songs-music","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/117532\/","title":{"rendered":"\u2018Just being who we are is political\u2019: disco trio Say She She on impressing Nile Rodgers and making bold protest songs | Music"},"content":{"rendered":"

Say She She\u2019s origin story is so perfectly New York it could have been lifted from a more racially diverse episode of Lena Dunham\u2019s Girls<\/a>. It involves a \u201cgnarly\u201d\u00a0eight-floor apartment block on\u00a0Manhattan\u2019s Lower East Side, a rooftop party turned sing-off and a debut show at Brooklyn\u2019s coolest bar. So it\u2019s mildly disappointing to discover that only one member of the trio still calls the Big Apple home.<\/p>\n

\u201cI\u2019m the last one standing,\u201d Sabrina Cunningham confirms as she appears on Zoom, calling from her home in Brooklyn. She\u2019s followed by Nya Gazelle Brown, who completed the band\u2019s recent European tour, including a sold-out show at north London\u2019s 3,000-capacity Roundhouse, while seven months pregnant. \u201cI\u00a0moved to Maryland over Covid,\u201d Brown says. \u201cI needed to stretch out and I wanted to be around family.\u201d The\u00a0last to arrive is London-born Piya Malik, who now lives in Los Angeles. \u201cWe are just very\u00a0nomadic,\u201d she says.<\/p>\n

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 \u2013 they cite Minnie Riperton, Liquid Liquid, ESG and the Lijadu Sisters as\u00a0inspirations for the new album \u2013 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. \u201cWe\u2019re not singing olde worlde stories,\u201d 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: \u201cIt\u2019s all of us together in the room, feeding off of each other\u2019s energy, exchanging ideas, melodies, sounds and politics,\u201d Malik continues. \u201cBringing humour into the most sordid dark stories of the internet.\u201d<\/p>\n<\/p>\n

On the shimmery Norma, taken from 2023\u2019s 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\u2019s Tale-style dystopia in which \u201csix hundred thousand women\u201d will be imprisoned for \u201cspeaking out of turn\u201d among other \u201ccrimes\u201d. The pain is couched in strutting vintage funk and R&B, and by the chorus the song morphs into an anthem \u201cabout really empowering other women\u201d, says Cunningham. \u201cIt\u2019s\u00a0like the ones who care are everywhere if you look for them.\u201d<\/p>\n

Disco Life, meanwhile, turns the\u00a01979 Disco Demolition Night \u2013 a\u00a0publicity stunt turned riot at Comiskey\u00a0Park stadium in Chicago, in\u00a0which records by predominantly Black and queer artists were burned \u2013 into a celebration of the titular genre. (Such is their love for disco that their name is a play on Chic\u2019s single C\u2019est Chic, while a surprise message from Nile Rodgers<\/a> during an appearance on\u00a0a CBS morning TV show last year reduced the band to tears.)<\/p>\n

Keen not to be defined purely as an \u201cissues\u201d band \u2013 \u201cYou can\u2019t think about and dwell on [the state of the world] 24\/7,\u201d says Brown \u2013 they are also aware that Say She She\u2019s very existence makes its own statement. \u201cJust being who we are is political,\u201d 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\u2019t face another Tory government. \u201cWe\u2019re women of diverse backgrounds and women have always been political because there\u2019s never been a time where it hasn\u2019t been contentious to be a woman or a femme. But, no matter what\u2019s 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.\u201d<\/p>\n

\u2018We\u2019re not going to be invisible\u2019 \u2026 Say She She. Photograph: Shane McCauley<\/p>\n

The trio bonded over the love of music and a penchant for sharing that\u00a0love publicly. Having moved to Manhattan from upstate New York straight from graduating high school, Cunningham was in \u201ca bunch of bands, singing back-up [and] singing with friends\u201d. Living above her \u2013 in that gnarly eight-floor apartment building \u2013 was Malik, who could often be heard not only stomping around at 2am but also singing. The pair became fast friends (\u201cShe probably thought: \u2018I\u2019m gonna make friends with her so I can tell her to change her shoes,\u2019\u201d laughs Malik), often watching each other perform in their respective bands across the city. Malik then introduced Cunningham to Brown, whom she\u2019d met at a Brooklyn house party that ended with the two of them harmonising on a rooftop.<\/p>\n

Music is medicine and we want to contribute to the medicine cabinet<\/p>\n

\u201cPiya walked in all cool with her British style,\u201d remembers Brown, \u201cand I was just like: \u2018Who are you?\u2019 Within seconds we were singing at each other. Then it went to singing at each other out at brunch or, you know, anywhere.\u201d<\/p>\n

Say She She\u2019s official formation was stalled slightly by the fact that each member was finishing other projects. They also didn\u2019t have any of their own songs. Not that it stopped Malik, who signed them up for their first gig at Barb\u00e8s, a cool musician hangout in Brooklyn, in 2018. \u201cWe hadn\u2019t quite convinced Nya to join the band yet,\u201d explains Malik. \u201cShe was working on solo stuff and we were like: \u2018Come on you can do it.\u2019\u201d<\/p>\n<\/p>\n

They got a third singer to fill the gap, meaning Brown was in the audience to watch her soon-to-be band\u2019s debut gig. She was also being watched herself. In the crowd to catch brass experimentalist headliners Slavic Soul<\/a> Party! was a certain Robert Plant. \u201cObviously, he wasn\u2019t there to see us,\u201d laughs Malik. \u201cNo one knew who the hell we were. And he was definitely staring at Nya the whole way\u00a0through the show.\u201d<\/p>\n

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<\/a>, in 2022. A year later came the richer Silver, which earned them an appearance on Later \u2026 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 \u201ca sea of girls and it was just so amazing to see all these young teenagers screaming and shouting the lyrics with us\u201d. 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. \u201cIt was life-changing,\u201d she says.<\/p>\n

Malik\u2019s smile suddenly fades. While the shows were a success, she claims they didn\u2019t make any money from the tour and \u201chad to pay all the expenses\u201d. She says they were reticent about bringing it up, fearing the negativity would distract from the music, but she\u2019s clearly fed up. \u201cThe things that have happened to us in the music business are shocking and it\u2019s important that people realise it\u2019s happening from all angles.\u201d<\/p>\n

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. \u201cWhen we started, we were conscious of being women who were trying to use our bodies, or our sexuality, or our identity, to push something,\u201d Malik explains. \u201cWe\u00a0didn\u2019t want to be objectified \u2013 we\u00a0wanted to be taken seriously as artists.\u201d But it also felt like hiding, something Say She She will not do. \u201cNow it feels political. Now it\u2019s like: \u2018Hey, we\u2019re not going to be invisible.\u2019\u201d The band nod in unison, that New York confidence never far from the surface.<\/p>\n

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.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"Say She She\u2019s origin story is so perfectly New York it could have been lifted from a more…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":117533,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[32],"tags":[6491,96,56,54,55],"class_list":["post-117532","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","category-celebrities","tag-celebrities","tag-entertainment","tag-uk","tag-united-kingdom","tag-unitedkingdom"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/117532","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=117532"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/117532\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/117533"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=117532"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=117532"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=117532"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}