As FLO’s first single of 2026, “Leak It” ups the ante on the trio’s passion for tying themselves to the 2000s sound, having already cited Destiny’s Child and Sugababes as just a few of the late 90s/early 00s girl groups they have naturally “succeeded” (though they seem to have ignored the point in time when Destiny’s Child was a quartet). That’s just the kind of braggadocio Jorja Douglas, Stella Quaresma and Renée Downer (not to be confused with Debbie), “the tenacious trio of talented young ladies”—as Cynthia Erivo calls them on Access All Areas’ “Intro”—have become known for. With “Leak It,” they keep seeking to fortify that image in their music. And, of course, in their videos.
Although “Intro” also has Erivo describing them as a “a trio ready to receive the baton passed on by the likes of Destiny’s Child, the Sugababes, SWV and countless other iconic baddies of the past,” more than anyone, they sound like the Pussycat Dolls—more specifically, “Leak It” sounds a lot like PCD’s 2006 hit, “Buttons” (co-produced by Polow da Don, Sean Garrett and Ron Fair). Indeed, perhaps the producers of “Leak It,” Julian Bunetta and Grant (lately best known for his work on Tate McRae’s songs), were inspired by that single when working on the beat. Or maybe FLO themselves pointed their producers in that direction. After all, the FLO members do seemingly pride themselves on knowing their girl group history.
And perhaps also Gwen Stefani’s music video history. As the concept behind the Olivia de Camps-directed “Leak It” seems slightly inspired by Stefani’s 2004 visual for “What You Waiting For?” (directed by Francis Lawrence), in which she goes to a “special facility” that advertises its ability cure writer’s block. In FLO’s case, the “special facility” they willingly enter to learn the ins and out of “leaking it” for the sake of “relevancy” is called simply The Retreat. Hence, the opening voiceover that announces, “Welcome to The Retreat. A private residence where we turn irrelevance into relevance.”
Considering FLO’s devotion to the 2000s, what they brand as “relevance” for the sake of this single is the concept of, that’s right, “leaking it.” Which, although it sounds kind of gross and decidedly related to a lack of bladder control, actually pertains to that now “vintage” maneuver of deliberately leaking one’s sex tape to the internet (that’s right Gen Z, the internet existed back in the early 2000s as well). A trope so well-trodden by 2004, that even Sex and the City wielded it as a plotline in the season six episode, “The Cold War.” In which Samantha Jones (Kim Cattrall) insists upon filming and leaking a sex tape with her then recently famous boyfriend, Smith Jerrod (Jason Lewis), so that she could “set the record straight—literally” about his sexuality after a rumor in a gossip rag blew up to the point where everyone (starting with the PR world) in New York presumes Samantha to be nothing more than his beard.
Not able to handle the, er, blow to her image, Samantha hatches this plan based on Paris Hilton’s “success” with the endeavor, even though it was her skeevy older boyfriend, Rick Salomon, who chose to leak their sex tape shortly before Hilton’s reality show, The Simple Life, premiered in 2003. So pervasive and “scandalous” was the news that it at last managed to kick the Pam and Tommy sex tape to the side for a while. What’s more, having one’s name mentioned in 2004-era Sex and the City would have been considered the height of relevancy, with Smith asking Samantha before they start filming, “Are you sure you wanna do this?” To which Samantha replies, “It worked for Paris Hilton” (on a related note: Kim Kardashian wouldn’t have yet been a thought to Samantha, as her tape wasn’t “leaked” [read: officially released, likely with Kris Jenner at the helm] until 2007).
Besides that, Samantha would also be of the same “logic” that appears in the opening to FLO’s song: “How can I not leak it? I look so good, you look so good, maybe we should all leak it together. Fuck it, you only live once, let the people see!” And so, that’s what the women of FLO appear determined to do at The Retreat. Along with serving up some pronounced 00s aesthetics in the form of freezing on certain “OMG!” scenes that then become framed in the style of gossip rags like Us Weekly and In Touch. This starts with Renée, before de Camps then cuts to a scene of Stella “working it” (rather than working out) in The Retreat’s gym. All the while, the amount of people—whether paparazzi or creepy stalker types—gathering outside the building starts to increase. This in proportion to how scandalous (read: skin-baring) the women of FLO’s behavior keeps getting.
Being that The Retreat acts as a “counselor,” of sorts, on how to gain relevancy (which, in present-day speak, translates to something like “turning impressions into clicks”), there also arrives moments in the video where one of the “employees” will hold up a sign instructing the women of FLO on what to do next. For example, “Say something controversial.” After which Stella comments on the drink she’s just taken a sip from, “This tastes like shit!”
As for Jorja’s “controversy,” it involves “falling from the sky,” which kind of reads and looks like she made a suicide attempt by jumping off a building in order to get some attention. Elsewhere in the video, there are two key scenes that embody another tradition of 00s music videos: an elaborate dance sequence that allows the members of FLO to work the choreo in unison (this, too, being in the spirit of most girl groups worth their [lack of] weight in the genre).
In fact, during the second elaborate dance sequence around the two-minute-twenty-five-second mark, the trio appear especially determined to channel the dance stylings of Michael and Janet. As for the former, they’re even so bold as to reference him as freely as Madonna still does by singing, “He on my page and creeping/So MJ, about to beat it.” A way to allude to Michael that doesn’t exactly debunk the association with him as a perv. But one supposes that at least they’re reminding a new generation of the kind of talent that once existed before social media.
And, talking of that medium, FLO does their best to update the concept of “leaking” to pertain to social media parlance, with such lyrics as, “Numbers keep increasing/Keep looking at my recents” and “They’re clogging up my DMs/I’m breakfast in the bed/Two piecing on these beaches/Up in their algorithm.” For added cachet on the “modernizing” of this decidedly 2000s phenomenon (i.e., leaking it), FLO’s final instruction from The Retreat is, “Now apology video.” This as the three are lined up in a row while seated at individual tables each set up with a light ring as they proceed to offer their own phony baloney apology into their video recording phones. For Stella, that means saying, “I take accountability. I’m so sorry.” For Renée, that means saying, “Mistakes can happen.” For Jorja, that means saying, “This isn’t who…we are.” She then glances at someone off camera to say, “Is that right?”
According to The Retreat, it very much is. With the same disembodied voice from the beginning of the video pronouncing, “Congratulations, you have completed the program. You are now a relevant girl band.” Even if, to be “relevant” in the present means consistently dipping into the past, most especially the 90s and 2000s. But, try as FLO might to bring back the language of what it means to “leak it,” the fact remains that the celebrity sex tape hasn’t been “a thing” for a while, with most having no need for such a “ploy” in the era of thirst traps that bare most of one’s body anyway. What’s more, it hardly seems a coincidence that the sex tape has fallen off at a time when sex itself has dwindled in subsequent generations.
