Alt-pop star US Girls: 'Things happened to me as a kid that broke part of my brain'
What is the most hurtful thing anyone’s ever said to you? “I don’t know what’s wrong with me that I make children like this.”
“I don’t want you.”
“That I’m insane.”
It’s not me asking the various musicians of US Girls about their traumas, but their frontwoman Meghan Remy, the creative core of perhaps the greatest band working in North America today. US Girls are as funkily, glamorously fraught as Roxy Music, slinking past any box you try to make for them. Remy has layered her bandmates’ answers over each other in a sonic collage between the songs on US Girls’ new album Heavy Light; other collages include the advice they’d give their teenage selves, and the colour of their childhood bedrooms. “My husband says I have a mania for the truth,” she says. “Along with a mania for vulnerability.”
Chatting in an office room at the Guardian, Remy is all eyes: she widens them to anime proportions for those moments of truth. Her previous album, In a Poem Unlimited from 2018, was a critically raved-about series of obsessively crafted studio pop songs; Heavy Light, her eighth, was instead recorded live, because “life is messy”.
Remy was raised in Chicago’s suburbs and now lives in Toronto after a spell in Portland. Her first album was in 2008 as a one-woman band. Now, 20 musicians appear on Heavy Light, including E Street Band saxophonist Jake Clemons: “The minute he starts playing, it’s the sound that you know from American music: it’s a breath thing, a blood thing, you can’t even learn it,” she says. Such a big band isn’t conducive to making money, though. She sketches out tour arrangements as “eight or nine people in three hotel rooms, sleeping in beds with each other for months at a time. We’re doing it because we want to do it, and have to, and believe in it.”
Her lyrics encompass abused women, global heating, political revolution. The Quiver to the Bomb casts the climate crisis as Mother Nature inventing humanity out of loneliness, then “kicking us off her land”. Remy says, “it’s going to get really interesting” when our social orders break down as a result, when “you can’t pay attention to them any more because your survival is so immediate. As a white western person, I’ve never been in a war zone. So we’ll see what that’s like.”
The single 4 American Dollars is a socialist anthem about the evils of accumulated wealth (“numbers on a screen mean nothing to me / We’re on the same boat, just different seats”), sounding like a 60s girl group anxiously entering the disco era. “You can’t take money with you,” Remy says. “But people want money, because it covers up all the stuff that should actually be