Boy Harsher Rework the Band After a Breakup on Get Mean

Boy Harsher have always worked in cold surfaces. What has changed is what sits underneath them. On their latest album, Get Mean, Jae Matthews and Augustus Muller describe the project as operating under a new philosophy, one no longer anchored in a romantic relationship. The two were partners for years before they broke up, and the record was made in the aftermath.

It is not a new lineup, and not quite a new sound. Matthews frames Get Mean as a shift in how the duo functions: no longer a couple, now a musical entity. Muller calls any creative partnership a kind of miracle, and says they wanted to hold onto one that was rare enough to be worth the difficulty.

The songs take up the fracture rather than dodging it. Matthews says most of them are grappling with heartbreak and rejection, and points to “Hard Beat” as representative, its car-crash imagery drawn from a relationship she describes as feeling like a catastrophe. That metaphor now reads less like a wound than a throughline.

Sonically, Boy Harsher stay inside the lineage they have always worked from, cold wave and synth-pop and EBM, smoothing the icy 1980s minimalism that has defined them since Careful in 2019 and the score to their own short horror film, The Runner. What gives Get Mean more weight than its genre tags suggest is the material beneath: two people who lost a romance and kept the band.