“They represent our friendship and our connection between each other,” Say Now’s Maddie Haynes tells Apple Music of the songs on their debut EP, needanamebro. It’s a fitting theme for the London-formed girl group, who became as much BFFs as bandmates after first singing together in early 2022, when good friends Yssy Salvanera and Amelia Onuorah reached out to Haynes after discovering her on social media. “We were all just in my garden in London and getting to know each other’s voices,” says Haynes of the first time they ever sang together. “I didn't even know if I was in the band yet, but I remember being like, ‘Wow, this could actually be a girl group.’” The three of them have been inseparable ever since (and, much like the Spice Girls did in their early days, Say Now have even moved in together). This EP’s name is a nod—and a farewell—to the placeholder moniker they’d been using for months until landing on Say Now. “We just thought it was perfect because it’s what we do,” says Onuorah. “Say what you want to say and don’t hold things back.” It’s not lost on them that that spirit has united so many of the girl bands who have come before them, from the Spice Girls to Sugababes and Little Mix. They are, of course, endlessly inspired by those acts, but also R&B artists such as Mary J. Blige, Ariana Grande, Bruno Mars, Yebba and SZA; trip-hop, UK rap and more. needanamebro is an EP of nostalgic yet fresh pop laced with gorgeous harmonies—and here, Say Now guide us through its tracks. Disc 1 “Netflix (Better Now Without You)” Amelia Onuorah: “This is like the anthem with your friends when you’re single. The feeling when you listen to the song is how we performed it: aggression, anger and happiness. It’s every emotion that you feel when you’ve had a breakup.” Maddie Haynes: “It’s not a drum ’n’ bass song, but it’s got elements. We really enjoyed filming the video, because it’s very dance-y.” Yssy Salvanera: “It was a song where we were all not in relationships and we were like, ‘Wait, we didn’t need them.’ Amelia and I became friends with new people and it was like, ‘Oh this is great. We found better loves in other people. I don’t need no man, I don’t need no girl.’” “Not a Lot Left to Say” AO: “This is upbeat while also being quite chill. We wanted it to feel like what the song is, which is talking to a friend. Sugababes were really the reference here and ‘About You Now’.” YS: “It’s about trying to be vulnerable but you don’t know what’s going to happen in the future with this person. It might be the right time, it might not be.” AO: “I feel the whole EP is quite self-reflective—it’s talking about the feelings you are feeling and recognising them now that you’ve already experienced them.” “Better Love” YS: “We realised we hadn’t really written a love song yet. But we didn’t want it to be a typical love song. So we were like, ‘Let’s write about our friends.’” MH: “Friends and family never get as much of the airtime as the boys do! And we care about our friends and each other so much that we just wanted that to be the first thing people hear from us.” AO: “So many people have seen our journey of being best friends and singing and doing covers and there’s no better way to enter the world with original music than a song that literally represents that. There’s a trip-hop reference in here, it has a really nostalgic feeling. It’s quite ’90s and the strings are so pretty. It pulls your heart.” Disc 2 songs MH: “We actually originally wrote ‘Not a Lot Left to Say’ on guitar and then production came after. And we liked the acoustic version—it just sounds much more pretty. And we realised, when you strip the production back, that the lyrics are actually quite deep.” AO: “Sped-up versions have become such a thing because of TikTok. I think it’s perfect for a song like ‘Better Love’. It almost has the opposite [effect] of the acoustic version—with this, you focus more on the beat than the lyrics.” YS: “And with ‘Massive’, we want to pay homage to the needanamebro era. That Drake cover went really viral on TikTok—we didn’t expect it to, but we loved that song lyrically because it was actually so deep and so emotional. And then we put out a version on SoundCloud and we realised we kind of needed it on the EP. So we were like, ‘Let’s bring her back and record her and make it all pretty.’ And give it to the fans.”