The five-piece girlband is on a mission to celebrate fun, dance floor bangers and cheeky British humour. Just don’t call them the Spice Girls.
XO’s mission is simple: have fun, write bangers. Formed in 2024, Emmy, Reanna, Shali, Summer and Zoe weren’t even born in the 90s, but they’re putting their own spin on the sound for a very Gen Z audience. Think the Spice Girls, by way of London, Liverpool, Essex, Derbyshire and Hong Kong; mix in some Katseye-style choreography and a modern spin on girl power, and it’s no wonder they’ve already sold out their first headline tour.
Though the girls originally came from performing arts backgrounds, they were brought together as a result of an advertisement in the theatre magazine The Stage. The advert was looking for fans of the Pussycat Dolls; they got that and then some. Listening to them in action conjures the spectre of Britpop in its prime. That is, beats to strut to, lyrics that celebrate girlhood and friendship (as well as putting the boot into rubbish exes) and five-part harmonies that add some welcome complexity to all the above.
Whereas XO’s first EP, 2025’s “Fashionably Late”, followed the trajectory of a night out – taking the listener from the excitement of getting dressed up, all the way back home, via the intermediary of dance floor bangers (because “we love to boogie”, they inform me) – their new mini-album, Need To Know, combines that sense of fun with a wry, very British humour.
Don’t think they don’t have claws, though. 2025’s “Silly Boy” was a foot-stamping clapback to a night out that ended in being catcalled, while “Paper” tackles “how it feels to deal with an issue when the world just keeps turning.”
After a year honing their craft on what they call the ‘Schools Tour’ – visiting and performing to schools across the country – followed by their first London gigs, XO are finally ready to go global. With a new mini-album out now via Polydor, and a November tour on the cards, their star is on the rise. Here’s what to expect.
Listen to “Need To Know”…
Read the interview…
Talk me through how the band was initially formed.
Shali Bordoni: There was a brief put out on social media and sent around to a few agents. The brief was very, very vague. It was like, ‘Do you like the Pussycat Dolls? Do you sing and dance? You should come along!’
Some of us thought it was panto, some of us thought it was a tribute act. We had no idea. It was just round after round after round [of training]. Eventually it was 8:00 p.m, there was no light inside.
We hadn’t drunk water, hadn’t eaten food, and they pulled out four chairs. They joked about us having to fight over the last one and we were just like, ‘No.’
We had no energy at that point, and this guy stood up and he was like, ‘Congratulations, we want to put together a girl band!’ I turned to Reanna and I was like ‘This is a fucking scam.’
Zoe Miller: But it wasn’t a scam. Here we are.
You’ve talked before about your vibe being ‘chaotic’ and wanting to keep your sound ‘rough around the edges’. Is that something you want to keep ahold of as you grow?
Reanna Sujeewon: I think it naturally comes out. I don’t think we’ve ever tried to keep it rough around the edges, but that’s just the way that we are and the way that we end up doing things. I think that’s a very authentic part of our DNA, the feral vibe.
SB: We want people to hear our music, see us and feel inspired to be confidently themselves. Unapologetic. Like, walking into a room and being the loudest person, because why not? We want people to walk into rooms and just be like, ‘We’re here.’ You know what I mean? That’s the vibe that we’re trying to get across. Don’t let anyone put you down.
ZM: Don’t let anyone dull your sparkle.
Performing for schoolkids must have been a trial by fire. How do you think it helped you hone your craft?
Emmy Statham: We talk about the school tour a lot because in the year and a half of us being publically a band, we learned the most from it. We were practically strangers who had never shared a prolonged amount of time together, never lived together. We were still learning to perform together.
Kids are your harshest critics. We learnt so much from them as well about the type of music they were interacting with, and the type of things that they were enjoying and not enjoying so much.
ZM: It was also one of those things where you could never really gauge the vibe, because we could start the performance and they’d be sat there deadpan, not a reaction. Then at the end all of them would be like, ‘Can I get an autograph?’ ‘Can we get a picture?’ We were just like, ‘Wait a minute, we thought you were hating this.’
I feel like the most awkward thing that we have had is when that fight broke out.
RS: Yeah, that was awks.
ZM: We were doing a meet and sign and then these two girls just came flying down the stairs, beating each other up.
Summer Askew: It was really bad. That was a nice school as well.
You reference 90s girlbands a lot in your work. Are you consciously trying to place yourself in that legacy?
ZM: There will never be another Spice Girls and there’ll never be another Pussycat Dolls. There’ll never be another Little Mix.
We grew up in that era where there were so many girl bands at once. Every [one of them] is inspiring, is powerful, is strong and they all bring their own something-something.
I feel like for us, yes, to become something as big as the Spice Girls would be incredible, but I don’t think we’re going, ‘We are the next Spice Girls.’ We are like, ‘We are XO and you’re probably going to love us.’
SB: I think when we were growing up, everything was a bit more wild and free. That aspect of being very unapologetic is what we want to bring back. That sense of it, but very much our version of it.
Is there a gap in the market currently for a good British girlband?
ZM: I feel like there are lots of British girl bands.
SA: It’s slowly rising, isn’t it?
ZM: To be honest, I feel like the UK music scene is doing a madness right now. It is probably the best music scene the UK has had for a while. We’re turning out some fantastic artists these days.
What do you think is special about the British girl band?
RS: The chaotic, feral vibes. I think no one is funnier than the Brits. Don’t get me wrong. I think everyone is funny but I think our sense of dry humour and [how we] just say it how it is, I think you just don’t get that elsewhere.
We always mean well but we will probably think before we speak about 90% of the time. I think it’s just so fun.
2025 song “Real Friends” was originally a Charli xcx track. How did it feel getting to play around with that?
ZM: “Real Friends” was a demo from Charli, but it had a lot of American references. It actually started like, ‘Got a house in the hills, run it up, hundred bills.’ Obviously neither of those things are very British, so for us it didn’t really make sense to be referencing American things, especially when some of us have never been to America.
So we heard that they were going to get people to rewrite it and then I ended up just rewriting it for fun one sunny Sunday. I sent it to our A&R and I was like, ‘I’ve done this.’ Two days later we were recording it. It’s kind of crazy, but Charli approved it, so she heard it and liked it.
Tell me about “Silly Boy”. Who came up with the idea of crafting a song around a catcall?
ZM: Me and Shali, we started writing it in the back of a taxi. We went past this pub, and we literally watched these two men whistle and catcall girls walking past. And we sort of sat there and were like, ‘How mad is it that that’s even a thing?’ And then creative juices got flowing.
We’ve got some really cool references in that song, like from the Pussycat Dolls. We love to play around lyrically.
It’s more serious than most of your other songs. Is that something you’d like to do more of?
RS: Definitely. There have been a few bits that haven’t yet come to fruition and I think we’ll get more of a chance to explore that next year.
ZM: There was a bit of that song that we actually had to take out because it might have been a bit much for some people. I feel like we played it safe because it was our first year releasing music.
SB: But we have so much to say. Every single one of us is very confident in our opinions, and we all agree with each other as well. We do really like putting meaningful things into our songs. Obviously, alongside having the dance tracks, because we love to boogie, but it does feel a lot more meaningful to be able to write stuff like that with your besties and then perform it.
What are you most excited for fans to experience on the new mini-album?
ES: I think just our little vulnerable moments. Like the track “Tell Me How It Feels” – we’ve never really done a ballad before. So this is us really in our feels.
It was actually a demo – I mean, bring it back to the British girl band. The demo was sent over, and Perrie from Little Mix was actually on the track. I think it’s a track that’s been going around for a while, but we made it our own.
SB: We went in to record it one day and then we were just like, we need to make this a bit more XO. So, we ended up staying in the food court at Westfield until we were kicked out, rewriting little things. Then we went back in the next day and recorded again.
What does success look like for you? Where do you see yourselves in five years’ time?
SB: Having budget for pyros.
Words – Vicky Jessop
