Despite releasing six albums over her expansive career, Meghan Remy—the woman behind U.S. Girls—only took her first singing lesson last year.

“I realised that I didn’t know how to sing properly at all,” she tells the Straight on the line from SXSW festival in Austin, Texas. “I’d been doing it for years by just opening my mouth and seeing what came out. It was a kind of pure expression thing. For this record, In A Poem Unlimited, I wanted to make the music more complex, and I couldn’t do that without understanding more about pitch and tone. Basically, I needed to strengthen my voice.”

It might have been a throwaway line, but Remy’s comment describes the album as a whole.

The artist has always made music about violence and power. In 2015, for instance, on the Polaris Prize-nominated Half Free, she discusses women’s work, the hardships of marriage, and suicide. Even earlier than that, Remy’s noise-pop projects picked at the injustices of the patriarchy. On In A Poem Unlimited, though, she’s approached that well-trodden ground differently. Rather than couching her discussions of violence in metaphor and allusion, the singer is much more explicit in her lyrical content. In other words, she sings with a stronger voice.

“It’s not really new for me to look at those ideas,” she says. “But I maybe took it a step further this time. I think that where I’m at in my life personally, I’m secure and safe enough to take a risk, and go out on a limb. I’m surrounded by good people and I’m in therapy, and I’m comfortable enough with myself at this point to be able to talk about things in that way.”

More than any of her prior albums, In A Poem Unlimited is a protest record. On “Pearly Gates”, for instance, Remy imagines a woman awaiting a verdict from St Peter, and feeling coerced into fucking him to ensure her passage to heaven. “Velvet 4 Sale” sees a female protagonist picturing a world where men are prey, and women are dominant. Her songs soundtrack the inequalities that shadow everyday life, and—fitting for a post-#MeToo world—articulate the West’s new willingness to call out society’s hidden power structures.

“All the lyrics [are about me] somehow,” she says. “Even if they’re not my story entirely, fragments of my daily life or my years of existence are featured. I can’t really separate myself from it at all. I’m not interesting in being too explicit about which stories are mine—there are some lines of dialogue that people have said to me, or things that I’ve overheard that I’ve put into the songs—but I’m definitely in there.”

Even more surprising than Remy’s new candour, though, is the feel of her music. Gone are the abrasive noise jams of records past, with the album instead drawing on everything from disco to ‘80s synth-pop. With her sweet, sometimes Kate Bush-esque vocals, the record—on the surface at least—seems sunny and ephemeral. It’s a deliberate choice.

“If you are going to write dark lyrics, you have to be light as well,” she says. “That’s a big-picture thing, to make it less depressing. You know—like a spoonful of sugar.

“In my experience, people don’t really want to talk about the stuff that I’m singing about on the record,” she continues. “So that makes it a tough sell, because it’s basically like willing people to open up their wounds and dig into them more, and that’s not very appealing. I’ve tried to trick them into doing it by making the music more palatable. I think it’s working.”

U.S. Girls plays at the Biltmore on Sunday (March 25).

Follow Kate Wilson on Twitter @KateWilsonSays