US GIRLS

Meghan remy: “We can’t play dumb any more”

“Iwouldn’t say Donald Trump and fake news have just arrived – these things have been around for as long as I can remember,” says Meghan Remy of Us Girls, when asked if the bizarre nature of recent events has had any bearing on her first album since 2015’s Half Free. “If anything has changed, it’s the fact that we no longer have the option to play dumb.”

Raised in Illinois and based in Toronto, where she lives with her husband, the musician Maximilian Turnbull (who records as slim Twig), Remy has instinctively pushed against the grain since forming Us Girls in 2007. across numerous releases, her lo-fi take on experimental indie has evolved from swaggering, lynchian melodrama (2012’s Gem) to the swooning funk and cinematic pop of Half Free and new album In A Poem Unlimited, its title taken from a line in Hamlet. “It’s an open-ended phrase that can mean something different for everyone.”

now, with the vaulting synthpop of “Poem” and “MaH”, Remy has designs on the dancefloor. “I want to dance,” she says. “I want to recognise my body as something I have control over. I can only assume others feel this way. [The anarchist philosopher] Emma Goldman said it best: ‘If I can’t dance, I don’t want to be part of your revolution.’”