Burgers, Hugo Spritzes & Global Domination With Say Now

The Hotel Chelsea has seen its fair share of musicians and stars, but I don’t think the guests in the lobby could have prepared for the British Invasion on a chilly Wednesday evening in the form of three bubbly Londoners — let alone three girls wearing bouffant-style hair, matching pastel striped knit minidresses, and enamel clutches. The bombastic trio are known as Say Now, and they are ready to make an entrance, metaphorically, with a bold creative and sonic refresh that serves as a reintroduction and revitalization of the hottest new girl group around.

Making a wave sonically in 2026 is hard, but Say Now are not holding back with a new sound and look orchestrated by their friend Vicky — also known as PinkPantheress. The three girls — Amelia Onuorah, Ysabelle (Yssy) Salvanera, and Madeleine (Maddie) Hayes — are all at different energy levels, but when they discuss Vicky’s impact on the group, they can’t help but gush. “When we met Vicki, it was really cool because we were getting opinions from another artist that we hadn’t ever really got,” Amelia says. “And it’s cool because she’s so honest and she’s really good at giving her opinion and helping us learn through it.”

The girls were in New York making music with producer Oscar Scheller (who works with PinkPantheress and Kelela) when Scheller posted a picture of them; PinkPantheress quickly reached out, and they got in the studio with her. After what they tell me was a “flop” recording session with PinkPantheress (“The song was low-key whack,” Maddie explains), they thought it would be over, but turns out she only wanted to go harder. They actually had other plans for this year, as Yssy explains: “We had a whole EP record that was R&B pop, and we scrapped it because all the music we made with Vicky was too good not to put out first. When we met her, we realized that we were stuck in the girl-group R&B realness.”

Say Now weren’t always a trio, and they weren’t always dripping in costume jewelry and wearing platform heels. Amelia and Yssy were the original duo, and they “kind of left a space for someone else to always join,” Amelia says. “We always knew we wanted to be a trio.” One of the girls found Maddy on Instagram — she was a children’s theater prodigy with a crystal-clear voice — and asked her to meet them at a waffle shop, almost five years ago to the date we met up in Chelsea. Yssy and Amelia were never going to invite someone into the group who wasn’t a friend, as Amelia says: “The reason it doesn’t work with groups is because they don’t have a say of who goes into the group, whereas ours was always very up to us. We got to choose who the third person was.” The girls recently just moved out of their shared apartment into their own big-girl places, and they swear they have not had major tiffs. Even their disagreements in the studio are laughed off; they say having three is magic because a majority is easily established.

While I’m inclined to not believe them, even an hour spent with them reveals that is probably the case. Yssy is the most reserved and serious of the group; her taste level and hunger for pop-stardom are both evident. Maddie is the shortest, most energetic, most irrepressibly bubbly of the group. She can deliver a paragraph-long missive, burst out into song, and laugh within 30 seconds. Amelia falls somewhere in the middle. Her model-like legs and beaming smile are just as sweet as she is, and the three complement each other so handily both personality-wise and musically.

The resulting music in the early years of Say Now’s formation was shaped by their love of R&B, Destiny’s Child, and Britney Spears, and it was passable girl-group music you know and love with stacked harmonies, insistent beats, messages about boys wronging them or feeling inadequate as a girl: the usual shticks. Their voices and chemistry were undeniable — watch any live performance and pay witness to how their harmonies melt together like butter on toast — but something larger was missing. After “hammering that in,” as Yssy says, “the songs that were on the old EP, any of them could be given to any artist.” That anonymity wasn’t serving them well, and they felt it.

After deciding to executive produce their EP, Pink and Scheller took the girls to the Cotswolds for 10 days for a recording session. Maddie recalls drinking 10 cups of tea a day and getting into chats with PinkPantheress and the girls. Before they got in the booth, Pink went back and asked the girls what music they grew up with. I ask them a similar question as we settle into our booth at the Cafe Chelsea, where the temperature has to be 60 degrees — their minidresses are not serving them, and they’ve all checked their matching trench coats — but the drinks are flowing, and they divulge their earliest memories of music. Maddie grew up listening to Madonna and Kylie Minogue, Amelia’s mom played Kate Nash, Erykah Badu, Adele, and Amy Winehouse, and Yssy was raised in a Filipino household, so she says “anyone that was Filipino or part Filipino in Western culture was the vibe at home.” Mix all of this into a blender, and you can start to draw through-lines through their new sound. It’s a mishmash of everything British, with the swagger of early Lily Allen, the sweet early voice of Kylie, and of course the flats-and-minidress energy any girl on Tumblr would recognize as early-aughts English à la Skins.

The resulting EP, Say What You See, out Nov. 13, is a tight, concise, “no-skips” (in Yssy’s opinion) take on modern girl-group music. They released “Hot & talking” alongside the announcement, but the crown jewel of the EP is “Met My Match,” a loud, in-your-face track that recalls early-2000s Brit-pop à la Allen, Cheryl Cole (when I compare the song to Cole, I get a round of squeals from the girls), and even Uffie. The trio had already recorded a cut of “Met My Match” a year before meeting PinkPantheress, but after she listened to it, she was convinced on the strength of the songwriting and gave it the Pink sprinkle, with brash synths, tweaking bass, and a flirtatious vocal mix on just the right side of saccharine. The song’s gone viral on TikTok, and the cutesy, twee aesthetic of the video has cut through the noise of endless musical releases this year.

The girls knew the larger puzzle piece that was missing was a creative director. With Pink’s help, they persuaded their label to hire Crystal of Crystallized Vision, a creative who counts K-pop girl group Ive as a client. Finding what made them unique was a done deal — their distinct voices, ethnicities, and personalities are all easy to notice — but, as Amelia says, “we never really found an identity as a group, and Crystal really helped us form it. Now we actually love matching dresses and matching shoes. We love having a uniform. Our differences are so cool.” Yssy emphasizes that Crystal was key to elevating who they were as a group, since they were typically doing the creative themselves. They’ve leaned hardcore into the British florals, English roses, and iPhone 6 photos. When we break for a moment to take pictures, a pictures-only vintage iPhone appears like magic — and another stroke of luck comes in the form of an ugly-chic floral couch smack-dab in the middle of the Hotel Chelsea, perfect for photos.

While their ambitions are larger-than-life, the stars in their eyes are so huge I can’t help but see them too. “We live by that philosophy: You really don’t have to sacrifice,” Amelia says with a smile. “You actually can have everything. We’re so lucky that we have each other.” For all the stargazing and big-shot talk, they are just three girls at the end of the day, growing up together and in front of the world. As we dig into our burgers, pasta, and steaks, they gush about trying a new matcha place every day on their New York trip and give me recommendations for my London trip later in the month. Their first New York performance was at Baby’s All Right in Williamsburg, a legendary indie haunt, where they say they spent two hours meeting every single fan in attendance. They confess that they hope it’s the last time they can do that at a venue. (Their dream venue is, like any good Spice Girl disciples, Wembley Stadium.)

Their friendship, they hope, will carry them from the 500-capacity venues to the world’s biggest stages, and the EP is a thesis statement that will, as Amelia says, take them further than they ever imagined. “We always thought, say, in 10 years’ time, we couldn’t see how we would progress musically and what would change. It was cool speaking with Vicky and figuring out a new world. Then we were like, ‘We can grow in this world forever and ever and ever.’” Yssy hopes the girls listening to Say What You See take away their sense of girlhood. “I mean that in a chin-wag way, because everything on the EP is like what you discuss with your friends after three days being apart from each other.” The trio have rarely spent that much time apart, but their closeness is their asset, and they’ve finally found a groove to settle into.

I send them into the New York night with their manager and publicist for a night of drag-queen shows at Pieces, a queer institution, and remind them to tip their queens. They’re a few steps ahead of me and already have loads of ideas for songs to request. With a rich idea of who they are and what music they like, there’s no telling what else will come from the minds of Say Now. All I know is that they’re ready to speak.