What is the most hurtful thing anyone’s ever said to you?

“I don’t know what’s wrong with me that I make children like this.”

“I don’t want you.”

“That I’m insane.”

It’s not me asking the various musicians of US Girls about their traumas, but their frontwoman Meghan Remy, the creative core of perhaps the greatest band working in North America today. US Girls are as funkily, glamorously fraught as Roxy Music, slinking past any box you try to make for them. Remy has layered her bandmates’ answers over each other in a sonic collage between the songs on US Girls’ new album Heavy Light; other collages include the advice they’d give their teenage selves, and the colour of their childhood bedrooms. “My husband says I have a mania for the truth,” she says. “Along with a mania for vulnerability.”

Chatting in an office room at the Guardian, Remy is all eyes: she widens them to anime proportions for those moments of truth. Her previous album, In a Poem Unlimited from 2018, was a critically raved-about series of obsessively crafted studio pop songs; Heavy Light, her eighth, was instead recorded live, because “life is messy”.

Remy was raised in Chicago’s suburbs and now lives in Toronto after a spell in Portland. Her first album was in 2008 as a one-woman band. Now, 20 musicians appear on Heavy Light, including E Street Band saxophonist Jake Clemons: “The minute he starts playing, it’s the sound that you know from American music: it’s a breath thing, a blood thing, you can’t even learn it,” she says. Such a big band isn’t conducive to making money, though. She sketches out tour arrangements as “eight or nine people in three hotel rooms, sleeping in beds with each other for months at a time. We’re doing it because we want to do it, and have to, and believe in it.”

Big band … 20 musicians play on Heavy Light. Photograph: Colin Medley

Her lyrics encompass abused women, global heating, political revolution. The Quiver to the Bomb casts the climate crisis as Mother Nature inventing humanity out of loneliness, then “kicking us off her land”. Remy says, “it’s going to get really interesting” when our social orders break down as a result, when “you can’t pay attention to them any more because your survival is so immediate. As a white western person, I’ve never been in a war zone. So we’ll see what that’s like.”

The single 4 American Dollars is a socialist anthem about the evils of accumulated wealth (“numbers on a screen mean nothing to me / We’re on the same boat, just different seats”), sounding like a 60s girl group anxiously entering the disco era. “You can’t take money with you,” Remy says. “But people want money, because it covers up all the stuff that should actually be your job, which is feeling, being curious, trying to know yourself, trying to know others.”

I don’t have an off switch when it comes to drinking – I just keep going. That’s the way my brain’s wired

This is Remy’s chief project. “It’s that cliche: if you can’t love yourself, you can’t love someone else. I’ve been in a relationship for 10 years now and I’ve found that is the case. The other person starts acting like a mirror for you and it’s so revealing.” What has she seen? “I don’t have an off switch when it comes to drinking – I just keep going. Because the way my brain is wired, it wants that, and my body’s not going to be the one to reveal it to me. Also, I have always had an inner monologue that’s always really negative about myself, and living intimate with someone means it starts coming out. It’s like a tic, I’m so hard on myself. And when someone who loves you is like, ‘Give yourself a break!’ … there’s nothing more powerful than someone feeling pain for you. It’s really healing.”

This relentless scrutiny of herself and others has left her with an almost supernatural-sounding ability to sniff out repressed feelings. “When I know that something doesn’t sit right, I feel it physically,” she says. “My stomach starts hurting and I know there’s something more there. Some things happened to me when I was a kid that broke that part of my brain, or implanted a bullshit detector. I have these really fine-tuned antenna, constantly picking things up because I’m trying to survive.”

There is a long pause. “This is always the part in so many interviews where it’s like: do I want to go there or not? I’ve been dancing around it in my work for ever.” Her songs are full of lines like “we can never know the hands we’re in, until we feel them grip”, from MAH, which stands for Mad As Hell. “Do I want to be that vulnerable and tell someone exactly what happened? I feel everyone knows what happened.” It was an abuse situation? “Mm-hmm, yeah.” A physical one? “Mm-hmm. So when that happens to you, and you decide to acknowledge it for yourself, it’s a paradigm shift. I can’t look at anything else.”

And it left you with a bullshit detector. “Empathy as well. There was a period, and it can still happen, when I was acting real squirrelly. There were probably people around me like, ‘What is up with her? She’s crazy.’ If they’d only known what was going on with me, maybe they’d have empathy. I know now what you can do to yourself when you’re deceiving yourself, or you’re trying to repress something, or the narrative you’re supposed to live by can’t land in your body and plant, because your body’s telling you it’s not accurate.” She says that now when she meets someone giving her attitude, “I can say: this probably has nothing to do with me, it’s something in their life and I should be kind to them.”

Today’s culture tends towards resisting trauma with “safe spaces”, but Remy is devoted to facing hers head-on, partly inspired by the writer and activist Sarah Schulman’s book Conflict Is Not Abuse. “We’re living in that cancel culture of, ‘No, I don’t want to talk about that’,” she says. “But if you’re feeling vulnerable, it usually means something important, something that you should go into. If something’s triggering you to feel bad, if you ignore it, you’re losing the colour in your life.” First getting on stage to perform was about “feeling the fear that I felt in abuse situations, that is like: this is dangerous. It’s like, you never feel as good as after you’ve been sick, because you understand then how terrible you felt. So I don’t have a fear of that vulnerability any more.”

She gives me an example of someone else who decided not to hide. The band played Coachella festival in the Californian desert and were invited to a marijuana-themed event. “We’re not crazy weed heads but it was like, whatever, it’s free, there’s going to be food, let’s go. We show up at this McMansion and there’s all this free weed stuff. And out comes this woman, Susan, who looks like your typical white mom lady. She said she was once high up in the Mormon church, a racist, terrified of drugs. She had some sort of injury, was at her wits’ end, tried weed, and her life changed. All that scaffolding crumbled. And now she’s best friends with Sean Paul.” The lesson being: “If she doth protest too much, that means go there. You have these white male Republican dudes who are so homophobic, you’re like: huh, I think you need to kiss a man right away. It’s going to be really good for you.”

‘Mania for truth’ … Remy in the studio. Photograph: Howard Bilerman

She’s still mad as hell, though. She doesn’t vote, reasoning: “I cannot name one politician who is not ill.” She rails against the military-industrial complex, the Catholic church, luxury goods, how matriarchy props up patriarchy, how history is taught in American schools, and smartphones (she deliberately threw hers in a pool last year). Against capital, ultimately. “You’re working so much at your job, and when you’re not working, you’re supposed to have the energy to dissect the system? No, that’s why you want to watch Netflix – you need a fucking break. That’s why they invented these time-suck leisure things, so you have no energy and no time to question the thing that you’re stuck in.” And yet, “the types of conversations are definitely shifting. In France, talking with people there about the movement to change the language to be more inclusive so everything’s not gendered. Whoa, we’re just having wine at some loud bar talking about this – I think that’s incredible.” There will always be music, too – “one of my gods, that thing that makes life psychedelic and special”.

More and more of us are having that scary, emancipating and near-giddy moment where we’re certain things are very bad indeed, and Remy is the soundtrack to that. “I’m not afraid of looking like a fool,” she says. “I’m not afraid of exposing myself, or being vulnerable, or being too earnest. Time’s up, time is so up.”

• Heavy Light is out now. A US tour begins on 4 April at Mocad, Detroit.