U.S. Girls’ Collection of Characters

180305_r31598Hua Hsu at The New Yorker:

I bought the first U.S. Girls seven-inch, “Kankakee Memories,” in 2009, for reasons that no music-discovery algorithm would likely predict. I didn’t know what U.S. Girls sounded like, or if it was indeed a band of American women. But the single’s title reminded me of my mother, who likes to reminisce about a summer in the early nineteen-seventies that she spent working at a diner in the small town of Kankakee, Illinois, just after she arrived in the United States. I eventually found out that U.S. Girls was one person, Meghan Remy, who grew up in Chicago but now lives in Toronto. Her songs were short and hazy, full of bright melodies washed out with abrasive noise. Listening to them was like listening to oldies while tilling gravel.

In the next few years, Remy released music on a number of labels, casting her vocals against different, comparatively cleaner backdrops, from guitars, distortion, and feedback to samples and dusty loops. She cycled through genres purposefully, one by one.

more here.