Illinois-born and Toronto-based producer, composer, and author Meg Remy made her first foray into film last year, collaborating with filmmaker (and fellow Torontonian) Grace Glowicki to compose the score for her newest film, a surreal horror-comedy entitled Dead Lover — which received its world premiere in the Midnight Section at Sundance, and screened at the Toronto International Film Festival, SXSW, International Film Festival Rotterdam, and Gothenburg Film Festival.
With the theatrical release of Dead Lover from today (20 March), U.S. Girls shares the glamorous, romantic, and eerie centrepiece of her original score, ‘You’ve Got Everything – But A Smile (Theme From Dead Lover)’ – a synth-heavy, theremin-inclined waltz, co-written with Jack Lawrence (of The Raconteurs, and also a key member of the new Nashville-based U.S. Girls live band). The track also comes alongside a dedicated video.
Says Remy of the track and her involvement in the Dead Lover score:
“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.”
Dead Lover follows a lonely gravedigger who goes to morbid lengths to reanimate her dead lover through madcap scientific experiments, resulting in grave consequences and unlikely love. It has received praise thus far from Variety, Dread Central, Esquire, IndieWire, ScreenRant, Bloody Disgusting, and Roger Ebert
U.S. Girls – ‘You’ve Got Everything – But A Smile (Theme From Dead Lover)’
Last year, Remy shared her ninth U.S. Girls album, Scratch It – an instinct-driven amalgam of country, gospel, garage rock, and soul, recorded live onto analogue tape over just ten days with a newly formed Nashville-based band. U.S. Girls also recently shared a brand new two-track project entitled ‘Running Errands (Today)’ / ‘Running Errands (Yesterday)’, celebrating ten years of her 2015 record Half Free and commemorating the evolution she has experienced over ten years with 4AD.
ABOUT U.S. GIRLS
Originally from Illinois, Meg Remy is established as one of the most acclaimed songwriters to emerge from Toronto’s eclectic underground music scene where she currently lives. As the creative force behind the musical entity U.S. Girls, her celebrated decades-long discography includes three Polaris Prize shortlisted and Juno-nominated albums on 4AD: Half Free (2015), In A Poem Unlimited (2018), Heavy Light (2020), as well as Bless This Mess (2023), live compilation Lives (2023), and her newest record, Scratch It (2025). Remy has exhibited collage work and directed several music videos and other video art works including her short film Woman’s Advocate (2014). She published her first book, a memoir called Begin By Telling (2021) and is working on a follow-up. Recently Remy has turned film composer, scoring Grace Glowicki’s horror comedy Dead Lover which premiered at the 2025 Sundance Film Festival. Her producer credits include Bria Salmena’s Big Dog (2025, Sub Pop). As a platform and persona, U.S. Girls operates on a uniquely out-of-time wavelength, alternately wronged and rueful, classic but contemporary, bruised vignettes of poetic Americana through a feminist lens.
U.S. GIRLS ONLINE
Twitter & Facebook: @yousgirls
Instagram: @usgirls.and.remy
