U.S. Girls

Heavy Light

Heavy Light, the remarkable new record from Meg Remy's U.S. Girls project, is a scavenger hunt for these elusive pasts — music devoted to reflection and retrospection.

The result are songs that are surprisingly deep, but not necessarily grand, often built around disco-inspired grooves, with vocals refracting light all over the album. It gives the record the feeling of an idiosyncratic religious ceremony.

Heavy Light finds Remy’s political commentary more radical than ever, but this time looking inward, offering a sobering and sometimes dark-humoured portrayal of survival and work.

Heavy Light both reflects back on her previous work and stands among the best of it.

Only the mind of Meg Remy can take the trauma inflicted on Earth and our childhoods and create something as wonderful as Heavy Light, another vivid and highly affecting album of experimental pop music.

Here, Remy explores a universal pain that comes with existing in modern society, and she does so by putting herself at the center of the story.

Heavy Light is almost always interesting if not always “catchy.”

It trades Poem’s jagged punchiness for overflowing empathy, coalescing as a meditative and challenging album.

Heavy Light is absent of poses and gimmicks and scored through with subtlety and nuance – it’s a razor-pointed, laser-guided pop record that speaks with fierce intelligence to the times.

Her latest, Heavy Light ... is more personal. It looks inward and backwards, acting as a retrospective of her career so far.

It's another huge step forward for the uncontainable U.S. Girls organism, one that skillfully combines the immediacy of personal memories with Remy's uncanny ability to inject her singular creative voice into every sound she touches.

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.

Taking the album as whole it’s another thought-provoking, stylistically diverse and intellectual entry into the U.S Girls catalogue.

If last album In a Poem Unlimited helped Remy broaden her audience by taking aim at the patriarchy over a disco beat, Heavy Light feels more theatrical, pinning her politics to piano melodies and gospel choirs.