If Heavy Light, the eighth and latest studio album by U.S. Girls, had a thesis, it would be that you can’t move forward without first looking behind. The 13-track LP by Meg Remy’s acclaimed experimental post-pop project plays like a shifting gaze between the person Remy was on past records, and who she’s evolved into on her newest release.

The nostalgia infused in the sounds and messages of each track is refreshing. More often than not, the swift emergence of adulthood sweeps in before you even realize that your adolescence has been left behind. Instead, Heavy Light chronicles Meg Remy — taking the time to share a fond goodbye with earlier iterations of herself, all while stepping into a new era of her artistry.

“A lot of the record is about looking back,” Remy explains at a Bloor West coffee shop on a chilly February afternoon in Toronto. “People always say, ‘If I could go back, I would do this,’ or ‘if I knew what I knew now, here’s what I would do.’ I don’t think that’s really true.” While peeking from beneath her shaggy, flaxen bangs, she speaks softly, but with a comfortable conviction.

But despite acknowledging that you can’t go back, she spends much of her new album looking back.

If Remy’s last project, In a Poem Unlimited (2018), was her meditation on anger, then Heavy Light is her reckoning with the past – before her abbreviation and her alias were born.

Before she was U.S. Girls, she was Meg Remy, and before Meg Remy, she was Meghan Ann Uremovich. “I come from a really specific (background),” she says of her upbringing. “I’m American and I’m white. I was raised Catholic and went to private school.” Having recognized that elements of her identity afford certain privileges, her storytelling has changed. “I can’t speak to anybody else’s experience. All I can do is present mine and listen when others present theirs.”

In 2011, Artforum’s Andrew Hultkran concluded that Remy was “a woman who clearly spends a lot of time in her apartment with the shades drawn.” But a decade later, this assertion is less true than ever. “I wouldn’t have finished the record if I was alone,” Remy admits. During our chat Remy explained that she chose to record the album live with a full band and backing vocalists. She even tapped her husband, musician Max Turnbull, to do the mixing and mastering.

The collaborative spirit on Heavy Light is a true sign of how Remy’s approach to her craft has shifted. “To make something with 15 amazing people, to hear what they want and incorporate it into my thing so that it’s not just about me, is so different from being alone in a bedroom.” Though her creative process still “always starts there,” over a decade into her career as a solo artist she’s comfortable letting other people in. “Now I can turn away from [the bedroom], or let other people be reflected in there.”

Other voices are reflected on the album too — literally. Tracks on Heavy Light are woven together by interludes that Remy likens to sonic collages, where she and her collaborators answer deeply personal questions. Between tracks, they serve as palette cleansers, where Remy’s personal narrative is interjected by voices sharing advice that they would give to their teenage selves, the most hurtful thing that they have been told, and the colour of their childhood bedrooms.

The revelations on the interludes and the tracks were intentionally cathartic. The writing and recording of Heavy Light aligned with Remy’s introduction to somatic therapy, which she describes as “a body-based therapy that is all about clearing the nervous system of trauma.”

Her eyes widen as she explains that “in nature when an animal gets scared, they freeze, flee or fight. Once they’re safe, they shake and shimmy to get the tail ends of that traumatic energy out of their system,” In contrast, Remy says that “human beings store it.” On Heavy Light, we hear the release. “The kind of therapy that I was doing opens you up to pull that out. It helps you so that you don’t store things going forward.”

One of the things she held onto was “Red Ford Radio,” one of Remy’s hallmark singles. To close the album, Remy chose to re-record a reprise of the song and, ironically, it’s one of the most vivid markers of her metamorphosis.

“My voice has changed,” she reflects. “I have control over my voice but I don’t have control over the emotion. It’s about figuring out how to sing these songs without crying but knowing that it’s ok if I do cry.”

In spite of this, ending her new album with a rerecording of an early hit was Remy challenging herself. “After working on this project for 13 years, to go back to these songs that I wrote and see if they’re sturdy or not; to see if I relate to them. I wrote that song when I was 22 and I’m 34 now. Do I still relate to it? Can I stand behind it?” She can.

While the message is the same, her relationship to that song has grown. “I think I was hiding behind that song then,” she says. “Now I’m saying, ‘No. This is me.’”