U.S. Girls has unveiled 'You've Got Everything - But A Smile (Theme From Dead Lover)'

Meg Remy - aka U.S. Girls - has unveiled 'You've Got Everything - But A Smile (Theme From Dead Lover)', marking her first venture into composing for film.

Co-written with Jack Lawrence of The Raconteurs — who now also plays in the Nashville-based U.S. Girls live band — the track is a theremin-laced synth waltz that sits at the heart of Remy's score for Grace Glowicki's surreal horror-comedy Dead Lover. The film centres on a gravedigger attempting to bring her deceased partner back to life through increasingly wild scientific experiments. It premiered in the Midnight Section at Sundance and has since been shown at SXSW, the Toronto International Film Festival, International Film Festival Rotterdam, and Gothenburg Film Festival.

An accompanying video, directed by Remy and Colin Medley, has also been released alongside the single.

Speaking about the composition process and the visual accompaniment, Remy said: "Director Grace Glowicki and I approached the score for Dead Lover by working largely with music that already existed…public domain recordings, fragments from my dusty hard drives, and compositions from my first three deeply lo-fi home-recorded albums. We gathered these sounds into piles we called 'scraps' and collaged the score from them, passing the timeline back and forth, adding or subtracting scraps until it felt finished. Even the main theme, 'You've Got Everything – But A Smile', was a scrap of sorts. It was an incomplete song Jack Lawrence had living on his computer that got unearthed, polished up and put to use. With all that in mind, it felt intuitive to take a similar collage approach to this music video. Instead of cutting a traditional trailer from the film, I went through all the footage that was shot and edited together 'scraps' that weren't used in the final cut. To paraphrase Kurt Schwitters, when everything has broken down, new things can be made from the fragments to create connections, ideally between everything in this world. Collaging never fails."

Remy's ninth U.S. Girls record, 'Scratch It', arrived last year — a blend of country, gospel, garage rock, and soul captured live to analogue tape across ten days with her Nashville ensemble. More recently, U.S. Girls put out 'Running Errands (Today)' / 'Running Errands (Yesterday)', a two-track release marking a decade since 'Half Free' and ten years working with 4AD.

A run of North American live dates follows this spring. The full Nashville band will appear at shows spanning Tennessee, Georgia, and Florida — Remy's first performance in the state. Later in May, a stripped-back duo configuration of Remy and Dorothea Paas will support Belle & Sebastian across Toronto and Chicago.

Upcoming live dates include:

MARCH
28 High Desert Art Fair, Pioneertown, CA, USA

APRIL
27 BelCourt, Nashville, TN, USA
28 Aisle 5, Atlanta, GA, USA
29 The Handlebar, Pensacola, FL, USA

MAY
25 Massey Hall, Toronto, ON, Canada ^
26 Massey Hall, Toronto, ON, Canada ^
28 The Salt Shed, Chicago, IL, USA ^
29 The Salt Shed, Chicago, IL, USA ^

with Mark Mothersbaugh
^ Duo Set w/ Dorothea Paas / Supporting Belle & Sebastian