Say Now have a lot to, well, say. Every thought, every joke, every anecdote and every fun fact lodged in the trio’s brains spills out like a waterfall of charisma, usually accompanied by a fit of giggles or – as you might expect from a girl band of theatre kids and Ariana Grande stans – an impromptu harmony.
So, when Maddie Haynes, Ysabelle Angeli and Amelia Onuorah spill into GLAMOUR HQ for their Women of the Year interview and video shoot, their energy ricochets off the walls and instantly infects everyone in the room. They certainly look the part: the glam is on point and each band member already has a clearly defined style niche (Maddie’s the girlie one, Ysabelle’s the tomboy, Amelia’s edgy without looking try-hard). But even though they’ve nailed the kind of look you might expect to be accompanied by aloofness, Say Now are an open book – effervescent with curiosity and optimism.
To be fair, the girls have reason to be especially excited today: en route to the shoot, they were told that they’ll be receiving the GLAMOUR Women of the Year Rising Star award in partnership with Samsung, following in the footsteps of Olivia Dean in 2023 and Bridgerton actor Charithra Chandran in 2022. “No one prepped us!” gasps Maddie, eyes wide and mouth gaping in disbelief. “We just can’t believe it. I’m excited to wear a gown [at the ceremony]!” says Amelia. “This is the first award we’ve ever won. And I’m so happy it’s for GLAMOUR – for women!”
On set, they’re a whirlwind of impeccably curled hair and pop-star magnetism. But they’re by no means pretentious, keen to talk to anyone and everyone about anything and everything. Within approximately five minutes, they compliment the staff (“Oooh, I love your shoes!” squeals Maddie about a pair of silver ballet flats), profess their undying love for matcha (“With vanilla, please,” requests Ysabelle) and admit that they always cry on stage when singing their debut single Better Love (“But only when we look at each other,” clarifies Amelia). And let’s not forget the other cause for their giddiness: three days before the shoot, they performed in front of a crowd at Hyde Park, supporting Kylie Minogue at British Summer Time (“My mum will never forget it,” says Maddie).
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All this flows out before the camera crew have even had a chance to mic the band up for their Women of the Year video. It’s like you’re immediately sucked into their circle of trust, invited with open arms to join their pop band of besties. What more could you want from Britain’s next great girl group?
“We want to be the cool older sisters for young girls,” says Ysabelle, 20, now sipping that iced vanilla matcha in the dressing room as her bandmates nod sagely in agreement.
“Well, cool older cousin,” interjects Amelia, 21, also drinking a matcha, “because your sister might snitch on you.”
“And we would never snitch,” agrees Maddie, 21, with wide-eyed sincerity while attempting to drain the green remnants of her own drink through a straw.
Amelia underscores their mission statement with a pertinent example: “We want someone to be able to come to us and be like, ‘I need a pregnancy test.’ And we’d be like, ‘OK.’”
A lot of female pop stars burst onto the scene with that very same message – that their mission is to empower the next generation of women to be as outspoken and unapologetically themselves as they are. But with Say Now, it feels particularly authentic, not only because the objective is embedded into their speak-your-mind name. Although Maddie, Ysabelle and Amelia didn’t know each other before the band, to them, genuinely being close friends is of equal importance as achieving their dreams as musicians.
The proof is in their origin story. Far from your typical manufactured pop band audition process, Amelia and Ysabelle were both individually scouted by their manager on social media. At the time, Amelia had just finished college in her hometown of Luton and was about to enrol on a fashion public relations course at London College of Fashion; Ysabelle, on the other hand, was entering her second year at a music college in Birmingham and living with her dad, brother and sister. Where was Maddie? Attending drama school ArtsEd in London, completely oblivious to the fact that her future bandmates had already been recruited.
“[The message from our manager] was so chill,” shrugs Ysabelle, living up to her bandmates’ assessment of her as the ‘nonchalant’ one. “It was a loose idea of making a girlband.”
“I think they were just like, ‘Let’s just find some singers and see what happens,’” says Amelia. “Then, when me and Yssy met, literally straight away we were like, ‘Oh my God, we are going to be best friends.’”
Pretty soon, the pair ditched their respective courses and Amelia moved in with Ysabelle, crashing on the sofa in her family home. “And Yssy would sleep on the sofa with me, even though she had her own bed!” Amelia continues, leading the anecdote as the ‘talkative and hyper’ band member. “We’d go to sleep watching How To Train Your Dragon.” Every few weeks, they’d go down to London to figure out their sound in studio sessions, staying in hotels and eating McDonald’s every day (double sausage and egg McMuffin with two hash browns, always). “We were together so much, but we kept saying ‘We want one more girl. We want to be a trio.’ And it was really hard because we were basically trying to scout a best friend.”
Enter Maddie: an all-singing, all-dancing child stage star who had already proved her credentials in West End productions of Les Mis and Matilda, as well as the titular role in a year-long run of Annie at the Birmingham Hippodrome – a 15-year-old Ysabelle had even unknowingly watched her from the audience. But Maddie was never just your typical musical theatre kid. She has pop music in her blood, via her mum Mandy Perkins, who was in ’90s band Deuce.
Amelia didn’t know any of this when she slid into Maddie’s DMs – simply asking, “Hey, can you sing?” But when Maddie replied within three minutes, along with video evidence of her talents, Amelia and Ysabelle had an instant feeling they might have found the missing piece to their puzzle. The trio arranged to meet for the first time at London’s ice-cream parlour chain Creams and ended up chatting for six hours straight. “I had plans afterwards with my boyfriend at the time,” says Maddie. “I remember texting him like, ‘Not coming!’”
Suddenly, there’s a pause in the communal storytelling, “Sorry, I just have to stop this real quick to say Amelia’s tongue is green and it’s sooo funny,” says Maddie, doubling over in her chair. Amelia whisks around and sticks out her tongue out in the mirror to reveal a matcha-stained mouth. “Oh my God! My tongue is actually green!” All three of them squeal and belly laugh like they’re sharing 3am secrets at a sleepover. Clearly, the instant bond they formed over ice cream two years ago is yet to wear off.
Still, there’s been a small hiccup in the trio’s journey. Even though they’d nailed the budding girl band’s lineup, there was still one all-important detail to figure out: their name. If you were one of the 250,000 people who followed Say Now’s early rise on TikTok (current follower count: 370,000), you’ll know that the trio entered the pop world as ‘needanamebro’ – both a winking and simple solution to not having an official moniker, but also a genuine plea to fans to submit suggestions.
For a while, it did the job. They were able to build an online fanbase by posting covers and vlogs charting their progress as a group, and the lack of a name only added to the Making The Band-style authenticity. Last year, they even released their debut three-track EP under needanamebro – also titled needanamebro. But around the same time, fans and critics alike began to get suspicious.
“We had an emergency meeting,” says Ysabelle about their moniker crisis.
”She’s not joking,” chips in Maddie, a deadly serious look on her face. “People on social media were like, ‘This is a marketing thing.’ Like, no! We actually just don’t have a name. It’s an emergency!”
The location for their meeting: the National Theatre’s café. The amount of time spent spitballing ideas: a full working day. The number of names that were thrown in the reject pile: impossible to count. “We were trying to think, ‘What do we stand for? What’s our music like? What kind of things do you write about?’” says Amelia. ‘Love Always’ nearly made the cut, as did ‘Truth Say’ and ‘GIRL’, an acronym for Girls In Real Life. How, then, did they land on the winning name?
“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?’”
It’s not only the Spice Girls’ feminism that appeals to the band, though, it’s their DGAF attitude, too. “Remember when they kissed Prince Charles?” laughs Maddie. “That was so funny. We’ve got to do something like that.”
And let’s not forget about the music. Known for boisterous pop songs filled with singalong lyrics about putting besties before boyfriends, the Spice Girls’ USP has also influenced Say Now’s musical output, particularly their more recent releases. Having drifted away from the early experimentation of their first few tracks – the soft breakbeats on Better Love and the pop drum ’n’ bass of Netflix (Better Now Without You) – the trio’s songwriting has solidified into a more cohesive sound, full of energy, dynamism and irresistible hooks. Though each band member has eclectic music tastes, ranging from Erykah Badu to UK rap, their ultimate goal when they step in the studio is to write, as Maddie puts it, “Spice Girls songs with an R&B bridge”.
Take this year’s single, Bitch Get Out My Car, for example, a song that begs listeners to belt its title lyric in an act of empowerment and catharsis, washing negativity out of their fans’ lives with the power of pop music. Then there’s Say Now’s latest single, Trouble, a track that has whiffs of Wannabe via punchy piano chords, but was actually inspired by Gwen Stefani and Kelis’ Milkshake.
“We wanted that cheerleader vibe,” says Amelia.
“Like Bring It On,” adds Ysabelle. “Really shouty, chanty and fun.”
The song popped off when they previewed it at British Summer Time in Hyde Park in July. We meet only a few days after the performance, and the girls are still radiating excitement – not least because they were there to support Kylie’s headline show. “She left us some of her rosé in our dressing room,” grins Ysabelle. Did they raise a glass of Kylie’s finest before the show for dutch courage, or after to celebrate? “We’re going to save it for a special occasion,” says Amelia. A sensible suggestion, but Maddie has other ideas, “We should have it on our barbecue on Thursday!”
That barbecue will be a rare opportunity for the girls to get back to a bit of normality – hang out with their friends and boyfriends (Amelia’s will be on the grill, as a professional chef) like regular 20 year olds. Because for all its highs, fame has made it difficult to stay connected to the people they grew up with. “I’m really bad at balancing. When we’re super busy, I can just forget about everything but the band,” says Ysabelle. “You just have to have people who love you enough to keep reaching out. I really commend my school friends for how much they want to meet up. We try to see each other, even though we all live quite far away now.”
“That’s kind of the same as me. I really appreciate low-maintenance friendships,” says Amelia. “There was a point in time where I hadn’t been back home for six months. I just completely forgot because of the band.”
The girls take solace in the fact that they have a new tight-knit friendship group in the form of each other – especially since they’ve lived together in London since 2022. That’s what gets them through, even when they’re feeling the pressures of being celebrities in the digital age. Daily stresses about having enough followers or looking good are easily squashed when you have two right-hand women hyping you up everyday.
“If I was on my own, it would be way worse,” says Maddie. “Even this top today, I didn’t like it. I don’t think I would’ve worn it on my own. But the girls were like, ‘I love you, you look so good.’ And I’m like, ‘Oh, I guess I do!’ The top is pink and frilly, of course I love it. When you surround yourself with people who love you and are giving out good affirmations, it’s hard to be sad.”
And, as Amelia says, flicking her platinum-blonde hair over her shoulder, that’s what Say Now is all about. “We’re just girls, we’re a friendship group and you’re a part of it, too. And we show ourselves looking f*cking bad [on social media] – we don’t want people to think we look like this all the time.”
“You should have seen me yesterday…” snorts Ysabelle.
“You should have seen me this morning!” says Maddie, inducing another band-wide fit of laughter.
And that, in a nutshell, is the essence of Say Now. They’re just three typical 20-year-old girls, who happen to be exceptionally skilled at singing and dancing, and serve killer looks – when they feel like it. They don’t want to be glossy, unattainable pop stars, on every billboard but out of reach to their fans. They’re by your side as much as they’re by each others’, holding your hand through breakups and into the best parties through their brand of belt-it-in-the-taxi pop.
“We know a lot of people watching us are younger girls – and to be honest, we have our fair share of teenage straight boys. We’re just trying to bring them all in,” says Amelia. “Being empowered as a woman and standing up against people is normal to us now. We want to keep pushing that so that the next generation think, ‘Wow, I can do that too.’”
