Almost Famous: Electrik Red

Four sultry singers discover the Dirty South by way of the Great White North.

It’s not your typical R&B group that can hole up in a Las Vegas recording studio and bang out a debut record in two weeks—the length of an average Sin City marriage. So how did “effortlessly ghetto chic” quartet Electrik Red do it? “We shook our balls,” says tall, sexy-shy singer Sarah Rosete. Sorry, balls? “Mmm hmm,” she purrs. “Big balls. Stugots.” As in guts, she clarifies an awkward moment later.

They might be the most musically proficient women to ever inspire drunken bar-top dancing and bad decisions—the subject matter of their first video and single, “Drink in My Cup,” a faux–Dirty South rhyme with a dark, sizzurp-drenched melody from power producers Tricky Stewart and The-Dream (Rihanna’s “Umbrella”). A classically schooled pianist, Rosete met Naomi Allen at performing-arts school in Canada. “We had extensive vocal training together,” Allen says. “We had a dreadful instrument class, learning the xylophone, metallophone and glockenspiel. We’d wail away in school shows. Parents would leave or check their cell phones when it was our turn. It was the worst!”  Meanwhile, in New York, Lesley Lewis (the group’s drill sergeant) and Kyndra Reevey (a.k.a. Binkie, the Scary Spice of the bunch—“She has no filter,” Allen says) met on the high school dance circuit and forged a fast friendship. The crew came together as backup dancers for Ciara and Usher and quietly worked up their own material, too. And then those famed balls came into play.

After five years dancing in everything from Miller Lite commercials to BET specials, the girls got a chance to perform for L.A. Reid, the chairman of Island/Def Jam, while he chewed on an unlit cigar. “We gave him a razzle-dazzle show,” Lewis says. Contracts, as the story goes, were signed the next day, followed by the quick Vegas sessions. “Now I just want to get out there and dance to it,” Allen says with a toothy grin, “and shake my balls.”

ALL ABOUT US!

Favorite place to dance?
Allen: “If we’re not in the club, we’re dancing on our chairs in restaurants.”  
Best hidden talent?
Reevey: “I’m Kung Fu Binkie. If someone messes with one of my girls, I have to karate chop him in the head.”
What’s the drink in your cup?
Rosete: “I use the Goose to get loose. Or the Cîroc Obama, which is really just a vodka-cranberry.”