A Bona-Fide Disco Album That Feels Urgently of the Moment

Many of the couples' dances of the twentieth century—the foxtrot, the waltz, the Lindy Hop—reflected the binary gender dynamics of the time: men led and women followed, on the dance floor as at home. There were exceptions, such as the underground drag balls that emerged from black culture and gained popularity in the twenties. But according to the Moral Reform Committee's 1916 investigation, they were still considered a niche movement of “perverts.” What finally broke the binary system was disco. In 1970, following the Stonewall uprising of 1969, DJ David Mancuso began hosting invitation-only underground dance parties at what would become known as the Loft at 647 Broadway. Around the same time, two gay entrepreneurs, Seymour and Shelley, purchased an unsuccessful venue called the Sanctuary, which had previously been a church on Hell's Kitchen. The following year, New York allowed same-sex couples to publicly share a dance floor, but what was legal and what was socially acceptable often did not align, and so these venues (and others) offered a space, both physically and emotionally liberating, in which a new imaginary could be built. In the late seventies, when disco faced a strong backlash and its records were burned in the streets, it was not due to changing musical tastes, but to reactionary instincts: disco was a subversive political act, a momentary utopia promoted by gay communities, black communities and immigrant communities, and all the people who existed at the intersection of each of them.

The vocal group Say She She's new album, Cut & Rewind, is a disco album that attempts to draw relevance from the genre's heyday and juxtapose it with a political moment filled with many of the same issues. The group, which includes singers Pia Malik, Sabrina Mileo Cunningham and Nia Gazelle Brown, identifies itself as a “discodelic soul” group, combining the soundscapes of disco with funk and psychedelia. Both of the group's previous releases, “Prism” (2022) and “Silver” (2023), contain songs that fit right into the Seventies dance floor, but the albums also include ballads that would have felt right at home on late-night R&B radio at the end of the decade. “Cut & Rewind,” released earlier this month, is the first to feel entirely disco – not as an act of homage or even entirely to update the sound and aesthetic of disco for a “modern listening audience.” Rather, the album sounds and feels like it was made by thoughtful practitioners of the genre rather than by nostalgia tourists using disco as a poignant tool of commentary on the present moment.

“Cut & Rewind” isn't as extensive as its predecessor: “Silver” is an hour and six minutes long, while “C. &R”. lasts about forty-five minutes – and there is tension, a pulse that drives it. Genre conventions aside, Say She She is, above all, a vocal group of exceptional skill and variety. The group members harmonize well, and each can perform a song on their own. But while on previous albums the vocals took center stage, Cut & Rewind features fuller, more expansive instrumentation and a richer sound than the band's previous records. On the title track, several bass lines build into a waiting drum beat. Then three voices appear. It's not only a song, but also a mission statement, with the line “We're done with the little things / now we're getting better and ready” becoming the defining thesis for the entire work. On “Disco Life”, the album's instrumentalists (Dan Hastie, Sam Halterman, Sergio Rios and Dale Jennings) create a dense and turbulent collision of bass, synth and drums that underpins disco's ode to utopia, the reclaiming of physical space. The track also aptly reflects the Disco Demolition Night that took place in Chicago's Comiskey Park in 1979. However, rather than calling her by name, the song's lyrics develop an extended baseball metaphor, opening with the words: “We're bringing back the big leagues/The playing field where everyone is free.”

On the other hand, She Who Dares is a kind of dystopia. Despite its upbeat, bass-heavy style, it depicts a not-so-distant world in which women are stripped of all rights and autonomy, and the vocal trio embody a kind of superhero opposition. The clash between the song's cheerful sound and its dark imagery is part of what makes it driving and relevant. Like much of the album, “She Who Dares” moves forward quickly, driven by bass and drums and a short, sweeping guitar solo in the song’s final act. Sound conveys a message even beyond the text: we must keep moving; we need to keep dancing. Meanwhile, “Under the Sun” is a pro-union track, lamenting the daily crisis of people forced to give their time, energy and spirit to unfulfilling jobs that make someone rich. The line “Power is a source of light / if you treat it with respect” floats above dreamy guitar.