Boy Harsher
- bizzarre
- 23 hours ago
- 6 min read
Boy Harsher sign to Atlantic & announce new album 'GET MEAN'. They share new single & video "Hard Beat".
Boy Harsher announce their new album ‘Get Mean’ for release on September 18th via Atlantic Records.
‘Get Mean’ is a meditation on love, loss, and survival. Across the record, Boy Harsher, the duo of Jae Matthews and Augustus Muller, confronts grief and heartbreak head-on, tracing the difficult process of moving through loss and discovering a path toward renewal.
At its core ,‘Get Mean’ is a redemption album – a document of one of life’s most painful chapters and the strength found on the other side of it.
Alongside the album announcement, Boy Harsher shares the new single and music video “Hard Beat.”
The music video was directed by Boy Harsher with cinematographer Owen Smith-Clark and explores themes of surveillance, deviance, and trauma with influence from Helmut Newton’s 1995 "High and Mighty" feature and the queer punk of Greg Araki’s films.
The video sees a pair of freaky deviants, played by Cheeky Ma and Mo Stark, speeding down an uncanny highway in a vintage Cadillac. Matthews, in a funeral veil, narrates from the backseat.
Meanwhile, a woman in a legbrace, played by Angel Zinovieff, is being recorded on closed circuit in a windowless tiled room. The movement in the video was choreographed by performance artist Monica Mirabile (FLUCT).
In early 2024, following years of increasingly well-received releases, a mounting series of ambitious collaborations and cross-genre experiments, and extensive stretches of worldwide touring to sold-out crowds, Boy Harsher confronted the most profound test of its existence: the end of its members’ relationship. In the wake of the breakup, which arrived on the heels of a period of personal turmoil, familial loss, and creative block, the future of the band was mired in uncertainty and the notion of new music impossibly remote.
It wasn’t until Matthews hit the road – sounding out her shifting identity and staring down the loneliness beneath the skies of West Texas, the Pacific Northwest, South Florida and points in-between, over and under, and off the map entirely – that the writing of a new Boy Harsher record began in earnest, one born of rootlessness and bound up in seemingly insoluble questions.
What happens when a band that’s been forged in intimacy, cloaked in the sonic textures of darkly swooning electronics, and dedicated to plumbing the complex and contradictory depths of romantic feeling falls apart?
What’s left after grief takes everything? What does a breakup album look like for a band as singular as Boy Harsher?
The result is ‘Get Mean’: twelve tracks of glittering edges and weary voluptuousness, diamond-dense instrumentals and vaporous vocals, a document of pain, dislocation, and redemption as only Muller and Matthews can deliver it.
But where previous Boy Harsher releases have drawn on the duo’s predilections for classical synth textures and nakedly confessional lyrics to craft a signature sound mired in darkness and transgression, ‘Get Mean’ brings many new shades to the sonic palette: from softy detuned pads and noisily squelching leads to pedal steel pitchbends, from brash percussive in-jokes to unadorned cellphone voice notes, from the driving coldwave beats that have long anchored the band’s sound, to New Romantic guitar textures and archly cheeky pop moves. It’s a new statement of purpose for a band with complete command of its instrumental arsenal and a maturing – if no less ravenous – aesthetic sense.
‘Get Mean’ stomps out the parameters of its bespoke musical universe, staking an unapologetic claim for new musical relationships on the level of form and genre even as it hints at new possibilities on the level of the deeply personal.
The first single "Jeans,” takes tongue-in-cheek aim at canonically Americana-fied themes of self-actualization and success, updating “Proud Mary” and Brat Pack signifiers for the era of gigwork alienation and national decline (“THAT’S LIFE / LIVING IN A SMALL TOWN / GAVE IT ALL UP / JUST TO SELL JEANS”).
In considering the genesis of ‘Get Mean’, Matthews describes it as
“what I had to give during the most extreme period of my life.”
And no doubt – the radical destabilization, the all-consuming doubt, the desperate drive to escape, all of these qualities are palpable on a record as transportive and multitextured as this. It’s not for nothing, after all, that ‘Get Mean’ is Boy Harsher’s “road album,” one recorded in eight locations across the USA and through to Mexico and Italy such that the listener can feel the Florida scrub, the icy Northwest rivers, the grit of the highway rumble strip.
There’s also something else, though, a feeling no less drawn from pain and confusion but given new life across an album that mourns, begs, jokes, and flirts its way out of the dislocation, out of the rootlessness and alienation and through to a place of abandon, of purification, of dancefloor catharsis. It’s like Matthews tells us in “Hard Beat,” careening in the inimitable Boy Harsher fashion between confession, exhortation, and proud self-reclamation: not just “I FEEL HIGH / WHEN THE LIGHTS ARE LOW," but also—“LET’S MAKE IT REAL.”
Since forming in 2014, Jae Matthews and Augustus Muller have cultivated one of underground music's most devoted followings as Boy Harsher. Their first EP ‘Lesser Man’, which includes the underground hit “Pain,” was originally released on a small run of cassettes, but then uploaded by a fan onto YouTube.
They continued momentum with their ‘Yr Body is Nothing LP’ in 2016 and ‘Country Girl’ EP in 2017, which lead to their acclaimed 2019 album Carefuland the 2022 album and film ‘The Runner’, which the duo wrote, produced, and scored.
Boy Harsher have continually expanded the possibilities of darkwave, industrial, and electronic music. Their signature blend of hypnotic synths, propulsive rhythms, and Matthews' magnetic vocals has influenced a new generation of artists while helping bring minimal synth, EBM, and dark electronic music from underground clubs to festival stages around the world.
Following the album release and a North American headline tour, Boy Harsher will head to Europe for a UK and European run, taking in a headline show at London’s Roundhouse, as well as shows in Manchester, Glasgow and Bristol.
Beyond the music, Boy Harsher continues to expand their cinematic ambitions. They are currently at work on their debut feature film, ‘The Lonely Woman’, starring Chloë Sevigny, FKA twigs, and Sturgill Simpson.
Photo by Nathaniel Jerome
Boy Harsher live dates
(w/support from Choir Boy)
25 September - Hudson, NY, USA - Basilica
27 September - Boston, MA, USA - Royale
29 September - Montreal, QC, Canada - MTELUS
30 September - Toronto, ON, Canada - Danforth Music Hall
1 October - Detroit, MI, USA - Majestic
2 October - Chicago, IL, USA - MetroSOLD OUT
3 October - Chicago, IL, USA - MetroSOLD OUT
4 October - Minneapolis, MN, USA - Varsity Theater
6 October - Denver, CO, USA - Summit
9 October - Portland, OR, USA - Revolution HallSOLD OUT
10 October - Portland, OR, USA - Revolution HallSOLD OUT
11 October - Seattle, WA, USA - The ShowboxSOLD OUT
12 October - Seattle, WA, USA - The Showbox
13 October - Vancouver, BC, Canada - The PearlSOLD OUT
15 October - Oakland, CA, USA - Fox Theater
16 October - Los Angeles, CA, USA - Hollywood PalladiumSOLD OUT
17 October - Del Mar, CA, USA - The Sound
18 October - Santa Ana, CA, USA - The Observatory Festival Grounds ^SOLD OUT
20 October - Las Vegas, NV, USA - House of Blues
21 October - Phoenix, AZ, USA - Van Buren
24 October - Fort Worth, TX, USA - Sick New World *
26 October - New Orleans, LA, USA - Republic
27 October - Atlanta, GA, USA - Variety Playhouse
28 October - Asheville, NC, USA - The Orange Peel
30 October - Washington, DC, USA - The Howard Theatre
31 October - Philadelphia, PA, USA - Making Time *
5 November - New York, NY, USA - Knockdown Center
14 November - Lyon, FR - Le Transbordeur
15 November - Paris, FR - Bataclan
16 November - Strasbourg, FR - La Laiterie
17 November - Frankfurt, DE - Zoom
18 November - Lausanne, CH - Docks
19 November - Munich, DE - Kesselhaus
20 November - Vienna, AT - Ottakringer Brauerei
21 November - Leipzig, DE - Felsenkeller
22 November - Berlin, DE - Columbiahalle
24 November - Hamburg, DE - Gruenspan
25 November - Cologne, DE - Essigfabrik
26 November - Amsterdam, NL - Paradiso
27 November - Lille, FR - L'Aéronef
28 November - Nantes, FR - Warehouse
29 November - London, UK - Roundhouse
1 December - Manchester, UK - Ritz
2 December - Glasgow, UK - SWG3 TV Studio
3 December - Bristol, UK - Bristol Electric (SWX)
4 December - Antwerp, BE - De Roma
