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Scratch It: When Meg Remy, the visionary behind U.S. Girls, got an offer to play at a festival in Hot Springs, Arkansas in early 2024 — over one thousand miles away from her home in Toronto — she enlisted Nashville-based friend Dillon Watson (D. Watusi, Savoy Motel, Jack Name) to assemble a one-time band for the occasion. The show went so well that she decided to ride thatenergy right back to where the impromptu band had initially rehearsed, in Music City itself, kickstarting the journey toward Scratch It.

In just ten days, Remy and her band — Watson on guitar, Jack Lawrence (The Dead Weather, The Raconteurs, Loretta Lynn) on bass, Domo Donoho on drums, and both Jo Schornikow and Tina Norwood on keys, as well as harmonica legend Charlie McCoy (Elvis, Bob Dylan, Roy Orbison) — recorded Scratch It live off the floor with minimal overdubs, mixed to tape.

Closeness and ease emanate from this core band with Remy’s singular voice sparkling on top of every tune, the most relaxed it has ever been.

Album opener “Like James Said” is an ELO-styled nugget of AM gold; a nod to the power of dancing alone and a lyrical response to James Brown’s “Get Up Offa That Thing”. Lead single “Bookends” — a sprawling, twelve-minute ballad co-written with Edwin de Goeij — makes up the heart of the album, paying tribute to the late Power Trip frontman Riley Gale through the lens of John Carey’s Eyewitness to History. Later, slinky diss track “No Fruit” finds Watson’s wah-wah punctuating Remy’s biting and poetic prophecy, aimed either at a lover or the greatermodern world.

Scratch It weaves together country, gospel, garage rock, soul, disco, folk balladry, and more, with Remy’s masterful songwriting threaded throughout. Her choice to discard the computer-based production of previous albums in favor of two-inch tape serves the songs well, introducing an element of sonic shapeshifting expected from an artist nearly twenty years into making records. If instinct was an instrument, Remy would be a virtuoso. Scratch It and see.

Half Free: U.S. Girls is Illinois-born, Toronto-based artist Meghan Remy, who releases her new album Half Free on September 25th.

Half Free is Remy’s first album for 4AD and is her most realised yet, focusing on characters in everyday struggles, with narratives inspired by the work of director John Cassavetes and Bruce Springsteen. Throughout, Remy explores themes relating to abuse and gender inequality, whether the broken wife in ‘Sororal Feelings’ (a track loosely based on the character Nora Bass in Michael Ondaatje’s Coming Through Slaughter), or the exasperated war widow in ‘Damn That Valley’, soundtracked by its intoxicating combination of thick dub flavours and Wall of Sound dramatics.

Other tracks include the glam stomp of ‘Sed Knife’, a minimal song poem (which first appeared on a 7” back in 2012) recast here as a Misfits flavoured rocker; and the lush Cocteau Twins-laced 80s soul of ‘Navy & Cream’. Elsewhere, Half Free finds Remy ripping into Gloria Ann Taylor’s 70s deep-cut disco to create the wondrously dramatic heartbreak of ‘Window Shades’ (written after Meg watched the Katy Perry movie, Part of Me), before closing on ‘Woman’s Work’; a nagging, arpeggio-laced ode to Moroder that picks at themes of beauty, anxiety and paralysis in the face of ageing.

Part of a vibrant Toronto scene, both Meg’s husband Slim Twig (DFA) and Onakabazien (who produced three tracks here) have again been summoned for the U.S. Girls roll call. Half Free also features Amanda Crist (Ice Cream), who provides vocals alongside Meg on a number of songs including ‘Damn That Valley’ and ‘Woman’s Work’, and Ben Cook (Fucked Up, Young Guv), who worked with Meg on the track ‘Red Comes In Many Shades’.

Half Free is an enchanting document of life at the point when it feels most on its knife-edge.

U.S. Girls Collection

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