Art via Evan Solano
Sophie Steinberg reflects the ideals laid out in the Hackers manifesto.
Under the U.S. Girls moniker, musician Meg Remy has lived many different lives: Meg the mother, Meg the activist, Meg the pop star, and even Meg the Hologram at SXSW. Seated across from me in her record label’s basement, all of these lives melt away and instead I am met with Meg, the wonderfully open soothsayer.
Remy takes me back 20 years to her bedroom, avoiding her-then boyfriend and learning how to make music on a four-track tape machine lent to her by friend and fellow musician, Inca Ore.
“The only space my boyfriend would honor was if I was working on music, because he was a musician. So I just recorded all the time,” Remy said of those bedroom sessions. “It was like a light bulb moment for me, because it contained a lot with very little.”
These early loop experiments formed a solid foundation for Remy, as she self-released her first album, Introducing, in 2008. Almost two decades later, Remy has established herself as a musical kaleidoscope: held up to the light, new patterns and sounds emerge with every listen.
Born in Illinois, Remy came of age wrapped up in the Chicago DIY scene before releasing music on her own as U.S. Girls. As she developed her brand of avant-garde pop, Remy blended inspiration from the likes of James Brown, Bruce Springsteen, and riot grrrl. It would take a decade, but eventually, Remy broke out with 2018’s In A Poem Unlimited, released on 4AD. Years earlier, a label representative from 4AD offered Remy their card after a one-off performance in the UK. While most artists would jump at the chance at possible representation, Remy tucked the card away and put a renewed focus on developing her music.
“Honestly, if you just let things happen, they do as they’re supposed to. If you have to push really hard, it’s not working,” Remy says.
Her most recent LP, Scratch It, out now, is a return to tape, recorded over 10 days in Nashville. Shedding her samples and synthesizers, Remy returns to her DIY essence: locking herself in her room and exiting with an album. The album opens a new vein in the U.S. Girls’ body of work, but Remy’s blood pumps the same. The music video for the lead single “Bookends” is a tribute to Power Trip frontman Riley Gale who passed away in 2020. The song explores mortality, interpolating Remy as a pageant queen against trippy visuals in 35mm film.
Outside of the serendipity of music, Remy plays the role of an author who published a memoir in 2021. She recently scored her first film, Dead Lover, in collaboration with director Grace Glowicki. She is the kind of artist who DIYs her own Brian Eno Oblique Strategy cards, instead of paying $25 for them at Barnes & Noble.
Back in the label’s basement, we unpack her eight most essential albums. Starting with Introducing in 2008, Remy explains her nonlinear work as it waterfalls out from experiences like breakups, motherhood, and trawling new cities. We talk about the first time Remy recorded in a studio, the poet Anne Carson, being open to criticism, and the video for her Obama diss-track, “M.A.H.”
Introducing begins with Remy’s iteration of the “National Anthem,” an instrumental that gets more disorienting with each rotation of tape. The song features a hypnotic tape loop, reflecting a blind American obedience. Remy covered her idol Bruce Springsteen’s “Prove It All Night” and produced vulnerable originals like “Mutate Machine” and “Don’t Understand That Man.” The project’s lo-fi drone is equally haunting and intriguing.
Initially, Remy had no intention of making a record. She worked with the tape as a way to process her failing relationship as it disintegrated around her. “I was doing it as an exercise. I didn’t think I was making an album,” Remy said. “All of a sudden, there were a bunch of tunes. I played them for a friend, and he was like, ‘I can help you mix these.’”
The lyrics were diaristic, a snapshot of Remy at 20-years-old. Inspired by artists like Delia Derbyshire, Remy compared working with tape loops to doing your eyeliner: if you make a mistake, you have to start over, or figure it out as best you can.
“I was coming off a period of making a lot of zines and living very DIY. That was the ethos,” Remy said. “I love it. I think it will never die.”
Remy toured across the country with the tape loop machine, lugging it on the bus and sitting cross-legged, next to it on stage. It was intimate: the music was shared between her and a machine. To this day, Remy believes tape loops are a feminine art.
“Women are good at making a lot out of a little,” Remy explains. “I feel that way about taking this small loop, and making it into something larger.”
“Test, test, test…” a baby’s voice rings out on the prelude of Remy’s third album, US Girls on KRAAK, ironically recorded in Toronto, Canada.
Freshly in love with her future husband and creative collaborator, musician Max Turnbull, aka Slim Twig, the album was Remy’s first project made in a studio, a departure from the DIY sound of Introducing and her second album, Go Grey (2010). Remy was letting people in, allowing them to touch her music and expanding beyond her own hands.
“I was living in Philadelphia at the time, and [Turnbull] invited me to come up and visit Toronto,” Remy tells me. “He was making an album at a studio where he had rented it, so he had 24-hour access to it. He was sleeping there and he could work at any time.”
During Remy’s visit, Turnbull encouraged her to record her next U.S. Girls album there and offered to help produce her songs. Coming from the hip-hop world, Turnbull and Remy’s soon-to-be regular producer Louis Percival, encouraged Remy to sample songs, experimenting with panning, and set her up with Logic.
“I got more tools and a collaborator and that just changed everything. We wouldn’t be sitting here talking if that hadn’t happened.”
Elevating the ethereal noise of her tape loops, Remy produced a synthesized cover of Brandy and Monica’s “The Boy is Mine” and experimental political ballads like “State House (It’s a Man’s World)” where Remy sings, “It’s a man’s world, we just breed here.”
Still, despite her unapologetic lyrics, Remy was self-conscious and raw in the studio. “I had sung live in front of people, but never recorded vocals in front of anyone. It was so hard for me. I was mortified. I cried through the whole process.”
The piece with the most tears ended up being Remy’s first hit, “Island Song,” eventually leading to a record deal with Fat Cat Records: “I got a record deal from playing that song live in Belgium.”
After touring US Girls on KRAAK, Remy was determined to join Turnbull in Canada. To save up for the move, Remy returned to her mother’s house in Illinois where she found a job at a personalized T-shirt factory, tasked with preparing heat transfer paper before it was pressed: “I did that for 12 hours a day. I would just pick them with an X-acto knife.”
That fall, with some money from Fat Cat and her savings from the factory, Remy left for Canada. The process for Gem began shortly thereafter. This would be the first project where Remy “went for a sound,” taking inspiration from 1950s beach pop and British glam rock featured on the BBC’s 1970s music show, Top of the Pops.
“I was obsessed with glam rock at the time, all that ’70s stuff coming out of Britain with glitter and big shoes,” Remy remembers. “A lot of it was just aesthetic too. I’m into glitter.”
Despite the pop origin, Gem is a slow burn. The album feels like the come-down of a good trip, or something a sneaky DJ would play just before the club closes and lights turn on. Part avant-garde and part camp, the album has no shortage of glitter, romance, and storytelling.
One of her most celebrated songs from the album, “Work from Home,” uses ’80s piano synths and a glittery music video to pay a tribute to sex workers. Partially inspired from her own experiences doing sex work in her early twenties, Remy wanted to “subvert the subversive,” exploring sex work as work.
After showing her husband her new batch of songs, Turnbull encouraged Remy to send her music to other record labels.
Remy found the tucked-away card from a decade earlier and contacted 4AD, sending them songs as soon as they were finished. After some back and forth, Remy flew to New York City to meet with the label, and soon, Half Free was in motion.
With a bigger budget and new expectations, Remy began working with sound mixer Steve Chahley, a veteran in the Toronto scene who previously worked with the Wu-Tang Clan, Neko Case, and Nelly Furtado. With narrative at the center of Half Free, Remy said she set out to make music that could reach people, specifically women. was in motion.
“I was really interested in universal stories,” Remy explains. “How I could write stories that all women could relate to, even if it was outside their specific culture or era or class?”
In the album’s standout song, “Window Shades,” Remy tells the story of a heartbroken woman, aware of the pain her cheating lover has caused, but waiting for him to come home all the same. Remy crys, “I’m that fool,” through layers of trippy percussion and creepy piano. The music is filled with unconventional rhythms, but the heartache is unmistakable.
Meanwhile, Remy was uncovering her own stories in therapy.
“Half Free was before #MeToo, and I was in therapy, going through my life and sorting through a lot of things. I was appalled at a lot of the things I was realizing and coming to consciousness with. At that point, I was very angry about patriarchy. I felt that the patriarchy was the root of evil, which I don’t hold anymore. That’s really dissipated for me.”
In “Telephone Play No. 1,” Remy calls her friend after waking up from a nightmare in which her father sent her a file of nude pictures of Remy as a child. They talk, unpacking the nightmare’s meaning, fathers and daughters, and mothers and sons. “I know it’s nothing new. It just happened,” Remy tells her friend.
Though Remy dove into Half Free with a pre-Me Too political and emotional force, she admitted that Half Free was a learning experience as Remy realized she could not speak for all women.
“I thought I could do no wrong and cause no harm. I learned a lot from that album, from not only making it, but having it consumed, having to talk about it, and hear myself talk about it, and having people question me sometimes. It was really a good thing for me.”
The cover of Remy’s widely acclaimed 2018 album, In a Poem Unlimited, reminds me of Stephen King’s Carrie, if she decided to return to prom to dance with the undead.
With groovy guitar solos and breathy vocals, “Velvet 4 Sale” begins like Pink Floyd’s “Comfortably Numb,” but soon reveals itself as an instruction manual for women seeking revenge on their abusers. Remy speaks directly to survivors, acknowledging their hurt and encouraging them to seek safety through elimination: “But girl, you gotta move on / Guarantee at least one bullet goes behind the eyes / ‘Cause they always could come back for more.”
“M.A.H.” an Obama diss-track, does not hold back as Remy critiques the former president for his dishonesty: “I’m a contrarian, almost to a fault,” Remy says. “That felt right to me then—it still does. I’m always wanting to just go deeper and deeper. The issue is never the one that you’re holding in your hand, everything comes from something else.”
After the song’s release, Remy said people pushed back on her critiques, approaching her at the merch table to call her out. But that didn’t bother her: “I had to answer for it, which I had no problem doing because I hate all presidents. I have a big issue with governments and borders and all kinds of things.”
Released a week before the worldwide shutdown in 2020, Remy predicted the future on Heavy Light, her seventh album. Singing about the plagues of American mythology, Remy captured a society floating in mid-air, and as it came crashing down. Originally titled 2020 (before Bon Jovi beat her to the punch), the project was all about hindsight.
“That’s how you learn anything, only through hindsight,” Remy explains.
Holding a mirror to her catalogue and past words, Remy reworked older songs, choosing “State House (It’s a Man’s World),” “Overtime,” and Go Grey’s “Red Ford Radio.” Remy wanted to feel her older work as an older person, singing them with a different lens.
On several interludes, Remy asks a collage of voices to share anecdotes about their childhood and advice to their teenage selves. One voice remembers their childhood bedroom being a “princess blue,” while another person remembers a time their mother said they did not want them. The memories are wistful, yet painful breaks, as Remy unveils the dichotomy of heavy and light.
On “4 American Dollars,” the catchy, Springsteen-esque lead single Remy sings, “Shake dice or shake your ass / We all do what we gotta do to pass.” The song’s “feel good” beat—much like America’s fading facade—hardly masks the potency of Remy’s words: “No matter how much / You get to have / You will still die.”
“It’s a topic that everyone can relate to,” Remy details. “Whether you have a lot of money or you don’t, it’s something that we all have in common. No one was thinking about the fragility of bodies and the fragility of these global systems that are set up at that time [in 2020].”
By mid-march in 2020, Remy’s intense tour, featuring an 8-person band and 7-person harmonies, was halted. The recording process for the album, where Remy collaborated with 20 people at the time, would be a thing of the past.
As things slowed down for U.S. Girls during the pandemic, Remy found herself recording her next album at home—first while she was pregnant, then, in the early days of motherhood. Split into before and after giving birth, Bless This Mess captures Remy in transition.
The first track on the album, the electronic pop “Only Daedalus,” retells the story of Daedalus, Icarus’ father, responsible for making the wings that ultimately led to his death. The song shows Remy, like Anne Carson, making art after myths, attempting to understand more about the human condition or what makes us U.S. Girls.
When I asked Remy what myth she resonated with the most, she didn’t hesitate to say Dionysus, the god of wine, fertility, madness, and theatre, citing a recent drunk evening.
“What’s great about [myths] is if you read them consistently, then when you’re having a situation in life, you can recall the stories,” Remy tells me. “You can think, ‘This feels just like this’ or ‘now I have this little metaphor to work on and not feel so lonely.’”
In many ways, Bless This Mess was a blur. Everything halted mid-production, and like a phoenix, Remy rose from the ashes, “born again to pick it up and finish it.”
Unlike some of Remy’s narrative-driven work, Remy allows herself to stray on Bless This Mess, not confining herself to a sound or one thesis. She mourns fading rainbows and our own fragility on “R.I.P. Roy G. Biv,” featuring Wurlizter-master Marker Starling. The synthpop ballad “Screen Face” is a long-distance anthem, capturing the frustration of Facetime dates and the struggles for digital intimacy. Part of the variety is experimental, but part of it was the reality of making music during the pandemic.
“It’s all over the place,” Remy said. “It was sent between so many different computers and it was a testament of that time, the in-between during lockdown, open, lockdown.”
The result is a sonic collage, glued in the layers laid by Remy’s pregnancy, then by her transition into motherhood. On the first few bars of “Pump,” a quintessential U.S. Girls’ song, you can hear Remy’s real-life breast-pump, as the loud suction sound is repurposed into a beat. With a Prince-like electric guitar riff, Remy asks sincerely, “How does the milk make it to your mouth?” as a chorus of voices murmurs, “Pump, pump.”
Nothing was the same after the total eclipse.
Before, Remy was scheduled to play at a festival on a random Monday in April in Hot Springs, Arkansas. She quickly reached out to her friend and collaborator in Nashville, Dillon Watson, to gather a group of musicians on short notice to play with Remy, 1,000 miles away from her home in Toronto.
Quickly the band was formed with Remy, Waton, bassist Jack Lawrence, drummer Domo Donoho, harmonica living-legend Charlie McCoy, and Jo Schornikow and Tina Norwood on the keys.
Rehearsing once in Nashville before loading up for Arkansas, something changed once they began performing. As the moon and sun formed concentric circles, Remy and her band sensed the magic in their collaboration, planting the seeds for Scratch It.
“It felt very stars-aligned,” Remy says. “Take what comes, be grateful for it. With this crew, it’s a crazy bond. Sitting around with them after playing this show, we started talking about how they make albums on tape and they make records in three days. I was like, ‘Oh, wow, I’ve never done that.’ I recorded on four-track, but not multi-track in a studio. Then realizing, after the fact, that the decision that I made, following the feeling in my gut, was the best choice.”
It was settled: Remy decided to record Scratch It on tape, live in the studio, over ten days in Music City. The result is a collection of songs that blend folk, disco, and standout instrumental breaks as Remy embraces a rawer sound. Being hyper-present while writing Scratch It, she doles out a folk tune on “No Fruit,” while “Dear Patti” tells the tale of her missing her idol, Patti Smith, at a festival where they both performed.
“Bookends” is a moving, 12-minute tribute song to Remy’s late friend Riley Gale. With harmonica riffs from McCoy, who told stories of Elvis and Bob Dylan in the studio, “Bookends,” much like grief, cannot be rushed.
“It was good to be less precious,” Remy ends. “Let’s make something, let’s capture something, let’s do it. Let’s put these limitations on it and then not question it.”
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