U.S. Girls Turn Suburban Kitsch Into a Beautiful Existential Ballad on New Song ‘Bless This Mess’

U.S. Girls turn a kitschy suburban household phrase into a stunning alt-pop ballad on their new song, “Bless This Mess.” 

The song harkens back to the diva ballads of yesteryear, with Meg Remy crooning about life’s constant complications and entanglements over a delicate electric piano. The track also arrives with a characteristically unique music video featuring decades-old video footage of Remy that the artist Evan Gordon manipulated to look as if she was singing the new song. 

“Before camera phones, the family camcorder was often the mirror tool used to capture selfie-like performances of teenage daydreams and insecurities,” Remy explained in a statement. “Recently, I unearthed a VHS tape housing footage of my 1998 self singing on top of my favorite songs of the day, along with my 2000 self publicly performing music for the first time, plus various other blush-worthy self-portraits. I decided to air out this acutely personal footage. My meta music video vision: 1998 self singing a song that 2020 self wrote.”

Gordon explained that he was able to make it look like Remy was singing “Bless This Mess” by “painstakingly dragg[ing] the eight-minute clip over each word of the song, forward and then backward, splitting off any partial or direct match.” To his surprise, Gordon added, he found lots of matches and was able to stitch the video together.

“This video is a realfake,” Gordon said. “It’s naturally authentic while being transparently fake. Its intent is not to deceive or convince, but rather to induce reflection and remembrance.”

“Bless This Mess” is U.S. Girls’ second song of the year, following “So Typically Now,” which arrived back in July. The group’s most recent album, Heavy Light, was released in 2020.