There’s a particular kind of artist who refuses to stay in one place — who treats every album as a complete reinvention and every song as a new argument about what pop music can mean. Meghan Remy, the Toronto-based force behind U.S. Girls, is exactly that artist. The best songs of U.S. Girls trace a restless, brilliant path from lo-fi tape experimentalism through disco-inflected art-pop to something that now feels genuinely singular in contemporary music. Whether you’re discovering her catalog for the first time or reassessing a body of work you’ve loved for years, this list exists to make sure you don’t miss a thing.
If you’re someone who cares about listening seriously — and if you’ve found your way here, you probably do — pairing these songs with quality audio equipment makes a real difference. Several of these tracks reward the kind of detail you only catch on a good pair of headphones. Trust that recommendation.
Velvet 4 Sale
Released on In a Poem Unlimited (2018, 4AD), “Velvet 4 Sale” announces itself with one of the most seductive grooves in Remy’s catalog. Produced with her long-time collaborator Maximilian Turnbull (Slim Twig), the track layers a churning, Chic-adjacent guitar figure beneath Remy’s coolly accusatory vocal, turning a meditation on exploitation and commerce into something you genuinely cannot stop moving to. The lyrics operate on multiple levels simultaneously — commodity, desire, the body as object — and Remy delivers them with the detached authority of someone who has already seen through the illusion she’s describing. It’s the song that made In a Poem Unlimited a critical landmark, landing on dozens of year-end lists and introducing U.S. Girls to a much wider audience.
M.A.H.
“M.A.H.” (short for Man Ain’t Honest) from In a Poem Unlimited is perhaps U.S. Girls’ most celebrated moment, and for good reason. The production, handled by Remy and Turnbull alongside a large ensemble of Toronto musicians, builds from a spare percussive intro into a swelling, horn-driven indictment that hits somewhere between early Talking Heads and a George Clinton fever dream. Remy’s vocal shifts from a near-conversational whisper into something raw and righteous as the track escalates, and the final section — where the horns drop out and a singular, insistent groove takes over — is one of the great recorded moments of that decade. Lyrically, the track engages directly with gender, power, and political dishonesty without ever feeling like a lecture; it feels like lived fury channeled into something irresistibly danceable.
Pearly Gates
Still on In a Poem Unlimited, “Pearly Gates” takes the album’s thematic core — gender dynamics, institutional power, the machinery of belief — and wraps it in some of the most carefully arranged music Remy had recorded to that point. The string arrangements here feel genuinely cinematic, recalling the orchestral pop of early 1970s AM radio while remaining completely contemporary in their emotional logic. Remy sings about judgment and worth with a wry, controlled grief that never tips into sentimentality, and the track’s measured pacing makes its emotional climax feel genuinely earned rather than engineered.
So Typically Now
Opening Bless This Mess (2023, 4AD), “So Typically Now” is a statement of intent that doesn’t arrive with fireworks — it arrives with something more unsettling: absolute stillness that gradually becomes density. Remy’s voice sits high and exposed in the mix, the production sparse in a way that feels deliberate and precise rather than unfinished, with textures that shift underneath like something breathing. It’s a song about recognition and disorientation, about seeing clearly and still not knowing what to do with what you see, and it sets the mood for one of her most emotionally complex albums with remarkable economy.
Rosebud
“Rosebud,” also from In a Poem Unlimited, is the album’s most nakedly emotional moment. Where other tracks on the record keep feeling at a careful remove — processed through irony, through groove, through spectacle — “Rosebud” simply sits with loss. The melody is almost unbearably lovely, carried by Remy’s voice with minimal ornamentation, and the production choices (a restrained rhythm section, subtle keyboard washes) refuse to compete with what the lyric is doing. It’s the song that demonstrates Remy’s range most clearly: she can write something this direct, this vulnerable, and it doesn’t feel like a different artist. It feels like the same intelligence choosing a different tool.
4 American Dollars
From Heavy Light (2020, 4AD), recorded and released during the earliest months of the global pandemic, “4 American Dollars” carries the strange, suspended quality of that period without ever making it explicit. The track was built around home recordings and contributions from collaborators submitted remotely, and you can feel that disconnected intimacy in the texture — voices that sound like they’re coming from another room, rhythms that feel slightly untethered from each other in a way that ends up feeling exactly right. Lyrically, Remy turns a small economic detail into a meditation on value, scarcity, and what we actually need from each other, and the song’s unhurried pace gives that meditation room to breathe.
Advice to Teenage Self
Also from Heavy Light, “Advice to Teenage Self” is built around a deeply personal conceit — Remy’s mother contributing spoken-word segments alongside her daughter’s singing — and it could easily have become maudlin. Instead, it’s one of the most genuinely moving things in the U.S. Girls catalog, a multigenerational dialogue about womanhood, survival, and the things no one tells you when you need them most. The production keeps everything intimate: close-mic’d vocals, a melody that feels like it was written at a kitchen table, an arrangement that knows when to get out of the way. If you’ve been sleeping on Heavy Light, this is the song that will make you go back and listen to the whole thing immediately.
Bless This Mess
The title track of the 2023 album sits at the center of the record both structurally and emotionally, functioning as a kind of mission statement for the project’s ambivalent, searching quality. Remy’s vocal performance here is among her most controlled — she finds a register that’s simultaneously warm and wary, affectionate and exhausted — and the production builds layers of texture (synthesizers, treated percussion, subtle choral elements) that feel like they’re accumulating meaning rather than volume. It’s not the most immediately accessible track on the album, but it’s the one that rewards the most repeated listening, revealing new details each time. For this kind of layered sonic experience, a great pair of earbuds will genuinely reveal things a phone speaker won’t.
Futures Bet
“Futures Bet” from Bless This Mess has one of the most interesting rhythmic constructions in Remy’s recent work — it begins with an almost off-kilter pulse that gradually resolves into something more stable, mirroring the lyrical movement from anxiety toward something like acceptance, though never quite landing on comfort. The vocal melody is deceptively simple, the kind of hook that lodges itself in memory before you realize it’s happening, and the production surrounding it uses space in ways that feel genuinely considered. It’s a song about uncertainty that refuses false resolution, and that honesty is its greatest strength.
Poem
“Poem” from In a Poem Unlimited is short — barely two and a half minutes — but it contains some of Remy’s most precise writing. The track functions almost as an interlude but rewards attention as a standalone piece: a meditation on language, representation, and the limits of what a song can say, delivered over production that strips away nearly everything but voice and a single instrumental thread. It’s the kind of track that makes you realize how carefully constructed the album surrounding it is, and how much Remy trusts her audience to sit with difficulty rather than demanding resolution.
L-Over
“L-Over” is one of In a Poem Unlimited‘s most overtly pleasurable tracks, a post-disco construction with a locked, driving groove that recalls the production style of early ESG records filtered through a thoroughly contemporary sensibility. Remy plays a character working through the end of a relationship on the dance floor, and the production’s insistence on forward motion — the way the track simply will not stop moving — becomes part of the song’s argument: sometimes you keep dancing because the alternative is staying still. The backing vocals here are particularly well arranged, providing a kind of communal warmth that makes the protagonist’s experience feel shared rather than isolated.
Rage of Plastics
“Rage of Plastics” from In a Poem Unlimited demonstrates Remy’s ability to take an explicitly political subject — environmental destruction, specifically the plastic crisis — and make it feel not didactic but viscerally felt. The production is the angriest on the album, with guitar tones that cut and a rhythm section that pounds with something close to aggression, but the arrangement never loses its pop logic. Remy’s vocal sits on top with a controlled fury that’s more frightening than a scream would be, and the track ends before it outstays its welcome, which is exactly the right call. Check out more tracks exploring music with social conscience in our songs category.
Time
“Time,” also from In a Poem Unlimited, is the album’s quietest and perhaps most devastatingly effective track. The arrangement is built around a simple melodic figure that returns with slight variations throughout, and Remy’s lyric — which engages with aging, loss, and the passage of time with a directness that feels almost painful — is delivered without the protective irony that characterizes much of her other writing. It works because the simplicity is clearly a choice rather than a default: this is a songwriter who knows when complexity serves and when it obscures, and “Time” is a demonstration of that knowledge.
Only Daedalus
From Bless This Mess, “Only Daedalus” uses the Greek myth as a starting point for something much more personal and contemporary — a meditation on creation, ambition, and the people left behind when someone builds something extraordinary. The production has an almost chamber pop quality, with carefully placed acoustic elements anchoring a more experimental sonic environment, and Remy’s vocal performance navigates the track’s shifting emotional register with impressive control. It’s one of the most lyrically complex songs on the album and one of the most rewarding on repeated listens.
If These Walls Could Talk
Released on a split with Slim Twig in 2011, “If These Walls Could Talk” offers a window into an earlier, rawer version of U.S. Girls — the lo-fi, tape-saturated aesthetic that characterized Remy’s early recordings, where the production aesthetic was part of the content, not just the container. The song’s distorted vocals and decayed sonic texture feel genuinely expressive rather than stylistically borrowed, and listening to it alongside the more polished work that followed reveals how consistent Remy’s thematic preoccupations have been even as her sonic palette has expanded dramatically.
St. James Way
“St. James Way” from Bless This Mess uses a specific place — a street in Toronto’s west end — as a lens for examining community, memory, and the way physical spaces accumulate emotional meaning. The production is warmer and more rooted than much of the album surrounding it, with acoustic guitar providing an unusual grounding element in a catalog that more often reaches toward electronics and synthesis. It feels like a song Remy needed to write, personal in a way that bypasses her usual protective layers of conceptual distance, and that vulnerability is what makes it memorable.
Superstar
Released as a standalone single in 2023, “Superstar” is U.S. Girls at her most playfully critical — a song about celebrity culture that manages to be genuinely enjoyable as a pop artifact even while it’s interrogating the machinery of pop stardom. The production is glossy and hook-driven in ways that feel deliberate, a performance of the very thing being examined, and Remy’s vocal plays with the conventions of a mainstream star turn while clearly keeping ironic distance from them. It’s a track that works on multiple levels simultaneously: as a catchy single, as cultural commentary, and as a demonstration of how sophisticated Remy’s craft has become.
Just Space for Light
Also from Bless This Mess, “Just Space for Light” is the album’s most meditative track — a song about creating conditions for peace rather than achieving it, about the work of simply making room for something better. The production is sparse and patient, built around sustained tones and a gentle melodic figure that returns throughout, and Remy’s vocal seems almost to arrive from a great distance, intimate and remote simultaneously. It rewards headphone listening specifically, the kind of track where stereo placement and subtle reverb choices become part of the meaning.
Pump
“Pump” from Bless This Mess is the album’s most straightforwardly kinetic track — a propulsive, rhythmically insistent piece that functions almost as a palate cleanser after the record’s more emotionally demanding passages. The production here prioritizes feel over complexity, with a locked groove that does exactly what the title implies, and Remy’s vocal rides the rhythm with the confidence of someone who has been making dance music long enough to know exactly how much to give and when to hold back. It’s not the album’s deepest track, but it’s arguably the most fun, and that’s a legitimate artistic achievement.
Running Errands
Released in 2025, “Running Errands” represents U.S. Girls’ most recent recorded statement and suggests that Remy’s restlessness shows no sign of settling. The track has the quality of all her best recent work — a sense of genuine surprise about where it ends up compared to where it begins — while opening sonic territory that feels genuinely new even within a catalog that has always prioritized change. It’s too early to know exactly how this song will fit into the larger U.S. Girls story, but early returns suggest it belongs on any list of her essential work.
Frequently Asked Questions
Who is U.S. Girls and what genre is her music?
U.S. Girls is the recording project of Meghan Remy, a Canadian-American musician and songwriter based in Toronto. Her music resists easy genre classification — across her catalog she has worked in lo-fi tape experimentalism, disco-influenced art-pop, chamber pop, electronic music, and post-punk. She is generally associated with the art-pop and indie pop categories, though those labels undersell the range and ambition of her work.
What is U.S. Girls best album?
Most critics and longtime fans point to In a Poem Unlimited (2018, 4AD) as the creative peak of the U.S. Girls catalog — it’s the record where Remy’s songwriting ambition, her political vision, and her musical range all arrived simultaneously in their most fully realized form. However, Bless This Mess (2023) has mounted a strong case for reappraisal, and Heavy Light (2020) remains beloved for its intimacy and emotional directness.
Is U.S. Girls music good for focused listening or background music?
Both, depending on the track. Songs like Running Errands, Pump, and L-Over work brilliantly as background music — they’re groove-oriented and physically engaging. But the catalog’s deeper cuts, including Rosebud, Time, Just Space for Light, and Advice to Teenage Self, genuinely reward focused headphone listening. Remy’s production choices are detailed enough that you’ll keep noticing new elements on repeated plays.
Where can I start if I’m new to U.S. Girls?
Start with In a Poem Unlimited — specifically with M.A.H., Velvet 4 Sale, and Pearly Gates. If those three songs grab you, the rest of the catalog will follow naturally. If you prefer something more intimate and emotionally direct, Heavy Light is an excellent alternative entry point.
Has U.S. Girls collaborated with other artists?
Yes — Meghan Remy has a longstanding creative partnership with musician Maximilian Turnbull (who records as Slim Twig), including a split release in 2011. Her albums also draw on a large ensemble of Toronto-based musicians. Heavy Light in particular was built around collective, communal recording sessions with a wide circle of collaborators, giving it a distinctly warm, ensemble quality.