Rare is the mess Meg Remy won’t chronicle. Abusive relationships, government surveillance, ecological disasters, capitalist exploitation—clunky when you spell it out so plainly, but these are the forces Remy’s characters are up against in her music as U.S. Girls. On past records, she rendered these narratives with solemn resignation or snarling intensity, her edicts of hard-earned hope never reaching a neat resolution. On her new album, Bless This Mess, she softens, searching for silver linings where there shouldn’t be any. Even when her optimism gets mangled through banal middle-aged and artistic angst—FaceTime is weird, but maybe serves a purpose? Music is healing, sort of like a rainbow?—Remy’s quest to find beauty amid a circus of suffering feels purposeful, like a weathered activist reflecting on how they’ve staved off cynicism after so many years.
Considering Remy’s roots as an experimental musician, it’s tempting to sticker each new U.S. Girls release as the “most accessible yet,” but Bless This Mess certainly makes a case. After beginning her solo career as a fuzz-crazed, lo-fi noise rocker—a DIY approach Remy later clarified was less an aesthetic choice than a result of limited resources—she transitioned to making art-pop that felt tame by comparison. Her projects pulled from ’60s soul, ’70s funk, gauzy psychedelia, post-punk, and synth-rock, her gestalt wandering between David Bowie and Broadcast, Animal Collective and Robyn. Her work was often difficult, littered with spoken-word skits and ambiguous narrative arcs, grainy mixes that eschewed clean arrangements, songs that detailed sexual violence and castigated Barack Obama.
Bless This Mess doesn’t shy away from such complexities—there’s plenty of anticapitalist critique and interpersonal distress—but it’s a decidedly forward-looking album. Glossier and more hi-fi than anything in Remy’s catalog, it draws from ’80s R&B, synth-pop, disco-house, and ’90s shoegaze to create a cascade of bright colors and gorgeous grooves, music that matches her aggressively optimistic demeanor. Opener “Only Daedalus” is a gold-streaked fusion of R&B and funk that uses the ancient Greek myth to comment on the hubris of our overbearing technocrats, Remy asking, “Where is your soul?” before chiding that “the world is not your wheel.” You don’t need to unlock the writing to have a ball, though; “Only Daedalus” begs you to lose yourself in the rhythm, to dance before wondering what it all means.
Although Bless This Mess favors retro funk and honeyed R&B, Remy recruits a diverse community of collaborators to help her explore different styles. On the smoldering synth-pop cut “Futures Bet,” co-produced by her husband, Slim Twig, she suggests that we can alleviate existential anxiety by “breathing in, breathing out.” Halt your eye roll—unlike self-help books and profit-seeking CEOs, Remy’s evocation of mindfulness reads not as a flimsy bromide but as a way to attain stability through the most freely available self-care practice. She follows this up with the Ryland Blackinton (Cobra Starship) and Alex Frankel (Holy Ghost!)-produced “So Typically Now,” an electro-house screed against urban flight and combustible real estate markets. Its criticisms are biting, but Remy also seems to be winking at former city dwellers who have discovered freedom beyond fast-paced, work-obsessed lives.
