Exclusive: Go Behind the Scenes of U.S. Girls’ New “Bookends” Music Video

This morning, U.S. Girls—the pop project of producer, author, and film composer Meg Remy—has returned with “Bookends,” the lead single from their forthcoming ninth album, Scratch It (due out June 20 via 4AD). The LP marks the first studio U.S. Girls release since their brilliant 2023 album Bless This Mess, Remy’s collection of songs about pregnancy and motherhood. Two years ago, I wrote in my profile on Remy: “There’s something to be said about whether or not Bless This Mess will be remembered as this crystalline, grieving and nakedly beautiful portrait of Meg Remy’s time as a pregnant woman in a post-COVID, chronically online world—or whether it will be remembered as only a great U.S. Girls project. You build the wings, you birth your children, you write songs that other folks will turn into smash hits. It’s a cycle of humanity turned aglow by the splendid romance of pulling magic out of thin air.”

“Bookends” is a tribute to Riley Gale, Remy’s late friend and Power Trip’s former frontman, told through John Carey’s Eyewitness to History. It’s a reflection on, for Remy, a lack of “hierarchy to suffering” and death as life’s “great equalizer.” The music video, a cinematic short, directed by Caity Arthur, is “about death and absolution” and how “death is one of the only certain things in life.” “However,” Arthur continues, “it also subverts the traditional narrative of death as a despairing void, rather, portraying it as a euphoric transitory experience or new beginning through a hallucinatory ensemble cast, a 1960s pop-star performance, and sleight of hand magic. As the video progresses, the TV channels alternate through these scenes as Meg’s lyrics evoke death in its various forms.”

Watch the music video for “Bookends,” and check out an exclusive BTS photo gallery from Arthur’s shoot, below.