After 2018’s In A Poem Unlimited catapulted Meg Remy’s U.S. Girls project to a new threshold of critical and underground success, she instantly gained a reputation as one of her generation’s greatest protest artists. Whether she was condemning American drone strikes on “MAH”, writing about domestic abuse on “Incidental Boogie” or documenting environmental health damage on “Rage of Plastics”, what separated Remy from her peers (and kept her music far away from the territory of “preachy” or “pretentious”) was that she never forgot to prioritise the pleasure principle.
On Scratch It, the most easily accessible U.S. Girls album to date, the pleasure principle is at the forefront more than ever before. Opener “Like James Said” asks listeners to give themselves over wholly to the groove (an easy request to submit to) and resists becoming anything deeper than an irresistibly danceable anthem (“If you wanna know how I feel / You gotta wait for / Wait for my biography”). If the music wasn’t so irresistible, it would be easy to argue that Remy was trying to keep listeners at arm’s length.
One would be hard pressed to complain if Scratch It turned out to be a record full of tunes in the vein of “Like James Said” – retro, funk homages whose focus was on activating the body more than the mind. However, Remy quickly turns in her trademark incisive social commentary on the following “Dear Patti”, an apology for missing a Patti Smith show that becomes a meditation on the struggles of trying to do it all as a working mother:
“Patti, I didn’t get to hear you play
I was making sure my kids didn’t fall in the lake
I was trying to make myself so small
In that space, I had no place being at all”
Though it will inevitably be interpreted by many listeners as such, Scratch It isn’t really a departure from the politically-conscious songwriting we’ve come to expect from Remy. More so, it represents an embrace of the principle coined by feminist activist Carol Hanisch in the late 1960s: “the personal is political”. These are not songs that lecture or try to instruct on how to build a better world, instead they are meditations on the fallout of living in a hyper-capitalistic world in 2025. Remy watches downs and outs congregate at night on “Pay Streak”, finding something commendable and thrilling in them not being “in it for the money” and warns of the limitations of individualism on “No Fruit”. On the 12-minute “Bookends”, meanwhile, Remy navigates mourning a friend in the industry who railed against the systems of power in their music. On “The Clearing”, this idea of the personal as political is given its clearest voice (“To love is to resist / The old embittered flow”).
Though Scratch It is more low-key than one has come to expect of U.S. Girls as of late, it is undeniably a commanding statement that feels like a musical victory lap. There are few musicians who would be bold enough to want to combine 70s funk with rock’n’roll and folk music influences, but here Remy does exactly that – and does it spectacularly. “The Clearing” is a reworking of a finger-picked folk lament by Micah Blue Smaldone that Remy turns into a groovy, bass- and organ-lead slow-burn, which also features an improbable but sublime harmonica solo. “Pay Streak”, meanwhile, offers Remy’s fullest embrace of Americana yet, beginning with the acoustic guitar and lyrics like “There is no west, the sun doesn’t rise / No, the sun never rests”. But like so many of Scratch It’s songs, “Pay Streak” begins as one song and ends as a very different one. As Remy’s character is left “out at midnight” watching the “boom town mice”, the songs swells into a moving piano-rocker that recalls Warren Zevon, Tom Waits and Dylan himself – and Remy plays the part perfectly, fit with dramatic declarations of “I said ‘Leave me be, get out of here, fool!’ / My heart is camped out on that frosty road of truth / I’m not going anywhere, soon”.
The comparatively lower-key musical approach of Scratch It compared to previous U.S. Girls releases draws attention to some of the most evocative songwriting of Remy’s career. On “Emptying the Jimador”, Remy employs little more than a few twinkly production flourishes and low-key repeating bass and guitar progressions to backdrop an incredibly personal reflection on one’s relationship with alcohol. Having told The Guardian in 2020, “I don’t have an off switch when it comes to drinking…That’s just the way my brain’s wired”, Remy finds herself with “A bottle in a room all alone” on the plaintive “Jimador”. Acknowledging the grey areas of one’s relationship with alcohol, Remy looks for relief from the weight of impossible expectations (“I’m the legend in my life, and that’s a lot to hold”) and admits to using alcohol to find the courage to speak her mind. That latter revelation results in the excellent line: “If language is a gift, I’ll always be the shoplift”.
As was obvious from the moment the song was released as a single, the 12-minute “Bookends” is Scratch It’s centrepiece. A tribute to the late Power Trip-frontman Riley Gale, the song begins in the mode of mournful, organ-led soul. But near the seven-minute mark, the song’s grief-stricken soundscape briefly detours into bubbly disco before then evolving into its final form; a viscerally angry, blues-rock sign-off. “Seventy thousand men, why am I wondering where Riley went?” Remy asks, capturing both the confusion and sadly ordinary reality of grief, as she references Gale’s death by overdose and the number of men in America who suffer the same fate yearly. Towards the song’s end, Remy repeats the line “He wanted to break the Cross” – a reference to Power Trip’s thrash metal single “Crossbreaker”. Spitting her lines with ferocious anger, Remy seems momentarily possessed, and invigorated, by the same anger that electrified Gale’s own music. It’s hard to imagine a finer tribute, and with Scratch It, it’s hard to imagine a finer U.S. Girls album.
