Their origin story may have been quintessentially New York, but the ‘discodelic soul’ band are now spread across the US – and they’re more determined than ever to be heard
S
ay 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.”
