U.S. Girls is Megan Remy, who assembles pop songs that sound like they've been scattered in pieces, picked up, and reassembled again into bizarre patchwork versions of themselves, making them the monsters to her Frankenstein, equal parts fascinating and frightening. In fact, the majority of Half Free wouldn't sound out of place soundtracking some sort of contemporary pastiche of the stilted black-and-white monster movies of old. One of the songs here is even titled "New Age Thriller," and there's really no better description of the musical atmosphere that Remy cultivates. Half Free is dark and weird and gritty and, most important of all, adventurous, combining its influences in a way that leaves it sounding like nothing you've ever heard before.

The closest comparison point I have to this album is Avey Tare's Slasher Flicks (just listen to "Little Fang," and I think you'll get what I mean). Both albums are similarly cinematic and horror-inspired, but where Enter the Slasher House largely comes across, at least to me, as messy and overly complicated, Half Free is more straightforward and less cluttered in its approach. Remy's voice is exceptionally well-suited for carrying such unconventional material, a bold and quirky drawl that is as hypnotizing as it is unsettling, especially when combined with her deceptively sing-songy melodies, spooky musical backdrops, and abstractedly sinister lyrics. Take opener "Sororal Feelings," which sets the tone for the rest of the album immediately, fading in on muffled basement synths and culminating in a creepily playful chorus that is punctuated by disturbing sound effects and ends on the repeated lyric, "Now I'm going to hang myself from my family tree."

The following three tracks - "Damn That Valley," "Window Shades," and "New Age Thriller" - take the musical textures and motifs introduced in "Sororal Feelings" to their extreme, layering competing demented vocal lines over top of one another and supplementing them with distorted synths, crunchy guitars, and ghostly strings and piano. These songs borrow as much from genres like disco, new wave, and 1960s-style girl pop as they do from more industrial and gothic-leaning styles. As a result, they'll make you want to dance at the same time as they make you glance anxiously over your shoulder.

Things come to a head in the closing track, "Woman's Work," which (despite the initial disappointment that it is not a cover of Kate Bush's "This Woman's Work") is an absolutely stunning musical achievement. At seven minutes, it takes its time unfolding, opening with burbling synths that spiral (think Iamamiwhoami at their most ominous) over the faint refrain, "That woman's work is never done." Then Remy breaks into verses as intensely as if she's dragging them straight from the pits of hell, culminating in the threatening chorus, where, backed by creepy robotic harmonies, she sings, "You arrived in your mother's arms/But you will leave wrapped in a black limousine." Breathless until the very end, it encapsulates an album that surprises at every turn.