US Girls - Heavy Light

The Guardian 80

(4AD)

The many albums of US Girls – Meghan Remy – could be summed up as a series of sound art installations evolving from experimentation into bold tunefulness. Album six, Half Free (2015), sketched female character studies like a pop Cindy Sherman. Album seven, 2018’s celebrated In a Poem Unlimited, was angrier and more explicitly political, even if Remy herself sounded like Debbie Harry doing disco.

US Girls’ latest, Heavy Light, doubles down on sumptuousness and backing vocals while considering multiple perspectives. To that end, there are collaged interludes, in which collaborators give advice to their teenage selves and the most hurtful things that have been said to them; a handful of tracks rework older US Girls material. One of these, Overtime, encapsulates Heavy Light’s best instincts. Recalling Abba via Bruce Springsteen – the latter’s influence telegraphed by a sax solo by latterday E-Streeter Jake Clemons – it’s a song about someone who drinks themselves to death on secret overtime payments. Denise, Don’t Wait, meanwhile, contrasts Phil Spector girl-group percussion with an oblique lyric about fraught mother-daughter relations. Combining bossa nova, a Patti Smith impression (on Born to Lose) and a song about the planet shrugging off its infestation of humans, Heavy Light confirms a major talent.