Over the past decade or so, U.S. Girls have carved a lane as one of the most critically acclaimed alt-pop projects thanks to Meg Remy’s graceful, razor-sharp, and increasingly accessible songwriting. But what if, as Remy puts it on the final song of their new album Scratch It, “to live is to lose face”? For the Toronto-based artist, the question extends from a loose catalog of shame, vulnerability, and powerlessness often relating to her life as a performer, but also a diffusion of that same identity through the fuzzy, fascinating lens of history. We follow, on ‘Emptying the Jimador’, an individual musician baring out her soul at a tequila-fueled gig at Toronto’s Massey Hall; but we listen, throughout the album, to a bandleader so energized by a single festival performance (and likely also the release of U.S. Girls’ first live album in 2023) that she decided to channel it into a new album, recording the follow-up to Bless This Mess on 16-track tape in Nashville with Dillon Watson on guitar, Jack Lawrence on bass, Domo Donoho on drums, and Jo Schornikow and Tina Norwood on keys. Co-produced with her partner Maximilian Turnbull, it’s unburdened and free-flowing, suggesting there’s so many ways to make a U.S. Girls record; and so many ways, of course, to live and grow yourself without losing it.

1. Like James Said

More overtly than previous U.S. Girls records, Scratch It finds Meg Regy in constant conversation with her sources of inspiration. “No one’s original anymore,” she said in a recent interview. “We’re always paying tribute and referencing someone. It felt very transparent for me. I’m very much made up of the things that I love and worship, like a giant bulletin board.” Meeting our gaze first is James Brown, whose ‘Get Up Offa That Thing’ gives way to a RuPaul’s Drag Race-worthy dance workout in which Remy proclaims herself “the queen of exercising pain.” The pain in question is interpersonal: “Just give me space,” she sings on the first verse, “I’m doing my own thang/ I don’t owe you anything.” The lack of elaboration is proof that the groove is strong enough to at least cast the argument away.

2. Dear Patti

The conversation becomes more direct, regretful, and frustrated: “Patti, I didn’t get to hear you play/ I was making sure my kids didn’t fall in the lake,” it begins. U.S. Girls were playing the same Arkansas music festival as Smith, opening for the National (“Only two women on the stage that day,” she laments), which is also the same festival that prompted Remy to book a studio in Nashville. Beyond the urgencies of motherhood, she gets into the power dynamics at play and stitches a thread to the previous song: rather than simply demanding space, she expresses the smallness this one is reducing her to. The band fashions a pristine glow as she dreams of getting higher, and then it’s just her voice and keys, just two women, “anyway on any day.”

3. Firefly on the 4th July

Remy offers her take on a song given to her by Russian songwriter Alex Lukashevsky, which includes lines like “Nuclear fear from the rear/ Spoils the atmosphere.” The song retains its soul influence but stabs harder on each beat, making way for a brief noise section that captures the anxiety without, well, spoiling the mood too much. “A hit so big/ That no one wants to dance to its music,” she sings. The comedy is dark and off-putting, yes, but it lands.

4. The Clearing

Another cover, this time of a song by Micah Blue Smaldone, who also wrote the final track on In a Poem Unlimited, ‘Time’. Though the poetry flows nicely, conjuring images of liberation and resistance, it’s the harmonica solo by Charlie McEvoy, who has performed with the likes of Elvis, Bob Dylan, and Roy Orbison, that gives the song a timeless feel.

5. The Walking Song

Remy counters the headiness of the past couple of songs by grounding herself back to the present moment, offering even simpler instructions than the opening “Stretch/ Move/ Pose/ Groove.” Sure, the refrain might just be her repeating the word “Walk,” but it’s followed by Remy using the Greek word for “descent,” which, as a Greek person, is quite funny: “I was gratified to find/ Katabasis was not his vibe.” What good is there in journeying to the underworld when “eternity is everywhere”? Of course eternity, under these conditions, is simply marked by the point your feet fall off, “savouring every stride,” or “just two-footing time.” Or just being young. Either way, it’s quite a vibe.

6. Bookends

Surprisingly, ‘The Walking Song’ and ‘Bookends’ were co-written with the same person, Edwin de Goeij. But you get why the latter – a 12-minute psychedelic ballad that reflects on the death of her friend and Power Trip frontman Riley Gale through a reading of John Carey’s Eyewitness to History – was the lead single. It’s an unconventional lead single not just in its sprawl, complexity, and surreal flow, but because it is a uniquely unconventional way of paying tribute. “70,000 men, why am I still wondering where Riley went?” she sings. It could be a figure plucked from today’s media cycle or one of the firsthand accounts of historic events documented in the book, yet the philosophical quandary remains: why does this one person – someone whose life wasn’t even closely entwined with Remy’s – weigh so heavy on her mind? U.S. Girls double down on the absurdity of it by segueing into a disco groove for the song’s most vocally potent section, in which Remy delivers one of her most primal, embittered performances. It may not sound like metal, let alone the kind Gate made with his band, but it’s heavy.

7. Emptying the Jimador

After the wide, disorienting scope of ‘Bookends’, U.S. Girls zoom back into a specific, though still disorienting, moment: a performance and after-party at Toronto’s legendary Massey Hall, in which her tequila consumption prompts an interrogation of the artist’s very relationship with alcohol. “It’s not the bottle I adore/ It’s the way/ It makes me say just what I mean,” she admits, and the evidence is in the songwriting itself, the directness of lines like “Still if language is a gift/ I’ll always be the shoplifting.” Her cadence is forthright yet somber, the feeling magnified by a spare rhythm section and languid guitar. For just a few minutes, it takes you somewhere else entirely.

8. Pay Streak

Rather than filtering a current event through several historic ones, Remy and her co-writer on the album’s penultimate song, Canadian folk musician Kim Beggs, focus on the Canadian gold rush through the perspective of a worker waiting tables in the country’s westernmost territory. There are a few lyrics that stand out – “My heart is camped out/ On that frosty road of truth” – but despite another stirring harmonica performance, the song itself feels a little undercooked.

9. No Fruit

Slinky and a little silly, you could look at ‘No Fruit’ as an argument finally unfurling. You can certainly hear it: the thumping bass, the wah-ed up guitar, the confrontational bite of Remy’s poeticism: “Man, if you don’t plant with the moon in mind/ You will surely suffer shallow roots.” But you could cut the song out much earlier, when Remy warns, “You better hope/ That’s not the last thing you say to me,” and get the point. In fact, those first three words alone are sufficient.