Heavy Light Turns U.S. Girls’ Rage Into Warmth — and It Works

Heavy Light is the 2020 album from U.S. Girls, and it turns the project inward. Where past work built its power from female rage, this one runs on memory and looking back at what came before. The sound has shifted too: rich, soul-based pop arrangements replace the harsher textures of earlier records, giving the album a warmth it hasn’t had before.

The Running Order

4 American Dollars opens the record at full stretch, nearly six minutes long, and sets the tone before Overtime picks up the pace with a sharp, driving beat. IOU keeps the momentum going, a slow-building song that shows off the album’s soul side.

Then the record breaks its own rhythm. Advice to Teenage Self runs under a minute, a fragment rather than a full song, and State House (It’s a Man’s World) follows at just over a minute and a half, brief but pointed enough to earn a place among the album’s most praised tracks.

Track by Track

Born to Lose and And Yet It Moves / Y Se Mueve sit in the album’s middle stretch as solid, well-built songs without demanding special attention. The same holds for The Most Hurtful Thing, another short piece, and Denise, Don’t Wait, a longer, more patient track that doesn’t quite match the high points around it.

Woodstock ’99 is the record’s high point.

It takes its title from the festival and turns it into something sharper than memory alone, a song built on the contrast between spectacle and consequence. The Color of Your Childhood Bedroom, at just 27 seconds, barely counts as a song at all, but it works as a link between tracks rather than dead weight.

The Quiver to the Bomb closes the album’s main run with its longest, most patient arrangement outside the opener, earning a place among the tracks singled out by critics. Red Ford Radio ends the record at just over two minutes, a tighter, more direct song that sends the album out on a strong beat rather than a fade.

The Short Pieces

The brief spoken-word tracks and short songs are the record’s one real weak point. Advice to Teenage Self, The Most Hurtful Thing and The Color of Your Childhood Bedroom add texture, but placed one after another across a 37-minute album, they sometimes break the flow rather than build it. One reviewer called the record a collection that shows flashes of real strength here and there, and that’s the right read: the high points stand tall, the shorter pieces less evenly gripping.

The Line of Best Fit described the shift as “a turn towards a far more luxurious, exuberant, breathless blend of soul,” and that captures what makes Heavy Light distinct from earlier U.S. Girls work. Pitchfork noted that for much of her career, U.S. Girls has explored female violence and rage. Heavy Light doesn’t set that history aside so much as look back on it.

Final Word

Heavy Light succeeds because it trusts warmth as much as it once trusted anger, and the arrangements back that up at every turn. 4 American Dollars, Overtime, State House (It’s a Man’s World), Woodstock ’99, The Quiver to the Bomb and Red Ford Radio carry the record, while the shorter pieces slow it down at times without breaking it.

This is a confident, well-built album that rewards patience.

album review · Heavy Light · indie pop · soul music · U.S. Girls