“I actually came up with six in a row,” says Maddie, proudly. “I was literally just spurting them out, like, “Say That! Say Truth! Say… Now.” By that point, though, they’d been through so many names that practically everything anyone said sounded a bit naff. So, they did what any reasonable group of women would do when making an important decision and decided to sleep on it. When they woke up the next day in the flat they share together in London, as Amelia puts it, they “were like, ‘Say Now kind of eats.’”
Girl bands have a particularly important place in British pop history. From Bananarama to the Spice Girls, Sugababes to Girls Aloud, few women in the country can say they weren’t at least a little bit influenced by seeing sisterhood writ large and looking glam on Top Of The Pops. Girl bands are fun, aspirational and make sure Radio 1’s constantly supplied with bangers. But they’re also inherently feminist – whether they’re shouting “Girl Power” or not – showing young girls that they can do anything, especially with your best mates by your side. So, when Little Mix went on hiatus in 2022 and left a gaping hole in the charts, there was only one question on the minds of the UK’s pop stans – who, if anyone, would step in as the nation’s de facto big sisters?
“I feel like we’re the next generation of girl bands,” says Ysabelle, sitting cross-legged on a high stool, her Bella Hadid-style baggy jorts revealing a pair of bang-on-trend brown boots.
Maddie, who looks decidedly more Baby Spice in a pink ruffled tank and matching stilettos, agrees. “We’re encapsulating how fun it is to be a girl our age in this generation,” she says. “We are so into fashion, fun, dance and just being everywhere. And that’s what Say Now is.”
“What reminds you that we are a modern-day girl band is how diverse we are,” adds Amelia, who today is bringing a dose of pirate-chic to the group in striped hotpants and a brown denim corset. “When I look back at all the other bands, diversity was almost not there, really. We’re all from different backgrounds, different cultures. Now, people can see themselves in us and be like, ‘Wait, I look like Amelia,’ ‘I look like Yssy’, or ‘I look like Maddie.’”
“Also, girl bands in the old generation didn’t have social media,” says Maddie. “We’re still doing all the things that the Spice Girls did, being chaotic, but we’re doing it online.”
The Spice Girls come up a lot during our conversation. Say Now have already been compared to the likes of Little Mix and Sugababes, which, naturally, they take as a compliment (“We would say we’re daughters of Sugababes,” says Amelia). But it’s clear Sporty, Scary, Baby, Ginger and Posh are their ultimate references. “They really enforced a message that took the whole world by surprise,” says Ysabelle. “They actually were huge. And I don’t think people really understood what they stood for.”
“Girl power, for our generation, feels really normal, because we are so good at championing women and feminism,” says Amelia. “But back then, that was crazy. They were like, ‘Girl power!’ And people were like, ‘What?’”