2017 marks a decade of U.S. Girls, the protean musical enterprise of multi-disciplinary artist, Meg Remy. Today, Remy announces her sixth studio album In a Poem Unlimited will be released Friday 16 February via 4AD / Rhythmethod.

Remy’s second release for 4AD, which also includes her recently released single, ‘Mad As Hell’ was tracked in collaboration with Toronto-based instrumental collective the Cosmic Range, and features arrangements by long-time contributors Maxmilian Turnball and Louis Percival. The dizzying buffet of live grooves on In a Poem Unlimited represents an inversion of the dusty, sample-based minimal textures of Half Free, Remy’s 4AD debut.

In a Poem Unlimited features dark meditations reflecting charged atmospheres that precede and follow acts of violence. Many of the songs are character studies of women grappling with power. Remy also rallies against the public lies told by political and religious leaders, and more crucially, questions the lies we tell ourselves in order to survive. In A Poem Unlimited may be Remy’s most individually distilled protest to date.

Following ‘Mad As Hell’, album opener ‘Velvet 4 Sale’ is released today. The song concerns a female narrator imploring another to buy a gun for protection, impressing that the only way to change men is for women to use violence. Remy says, “Men are lucky, women (and children) have yet to take up arms. And although I hope this never happens and I completely disagree that violence is ever effective, this very idea was ripe for a song.”

The accompanying video (see above) explores the idea of acknowledgement as a form of retribution, a counterbalance more powerful than violence itself. Remy plays a police officer who discovers that a fellow cop who has beaten his wife will be left off the hook as a “professional courtesy”. By the power of her unrelenting gaze she banishes the abuser in the final images of this powerful and provocative video. This striking tableau representing the power of bearing witness ties back into the album’s underlying theme; that truth and acknowledgement are our most potent and corrosive weapons in the fight against repressive inequality. Remy’s work with this video (which she co-directed with Alex Kingsmill) and the album as a whole, illustrate and seek to inspire the taking up of these moral arms.