Boy Harsher announce Atlantic debut ‘Get Mean,’ out September 18, with the video for ‘Hard Beat’ and a North American fall tour
Boy Harsher built their reputation on making despair danceable, so it follows that the album documenting the end of their romantic relationship is also the hardest-hitting thing they have released. The Massachusetts duo of Jae Matthews and Augustus Muller announced Get Mean on Tuesday (July 21), out September 18 via Nude Club and Atlantic Records, and shared the single “Hard Beat“ alongside a self-directed video.
It is their first full-length since 2022’s The Runner, the album and film they wrote, produced, and scored themselves, and it doubles as their major-label debut after a decade spent as one of underground electronic music’s most fiercely protected properties.
“Hard Beat” is the sound of the machinery that made them club fixtures in the first place. A catchy bass-synth figure, an unrelenting kick, and Matthews’ voice slicing through the mix like cold air through an open car window.
“Take the wheel and lost control, trust me once, let’s make it real,” she sings on the way into a chorus that is genuinely unsettling, the sort of hook that works on a dancefloor precisely because it refuses to reassure you. Where June’s “Jeans” reintroduced the band through wiry new wave guitar and western detail, this one bears down on the industrial minimalism they helped codify.
A Breakup Album Recorded Across Three Countries
The circumstances behind Get Mean explain its intensity. Matthews and Muller, who formed the band as a couple in 2014, ended their romantic partnership in early 2024, putting Boy Harsher’s future in real doubt. What followed was a period of travel, isolation, familial loss, and creative block, and then, gradually, a record. They cut it over roughly two years in eight locations across the United States, Mexico, and Italy, and they describe it as a road album.
We’re all running from something, we’re all running to something,” the pair have said of it. Matthews puts the emotional cost more bluntly, calling the twelve tracks “what I had to give during the most extreme period of my life”
The result stretches their palette without abandoning it. Where earlier Boy Harsher leaned on classical synth textures and nakedly confessional writing, Get Mean brings in detuned pads, new romantic guitar, and what the duo cheerfully calls pop inflection.
The tracklist runs from opener “Ronny” through “Jeans,” “Break Me,” “Tough Luck (When You Don’t Call),” “Faulty,” “Coming Home,” “Hard Beat,” “Ice Pick (Walk Away),” “Ivy’s Spiral,” “Pray 4 Me,” “Falling ~,” and closer “Bleed.” They have framed the whole thing as a redemption album, a document of a painful chapter and the strength found on the far side of it.
Cameras, Cadillacs, and the Nude Club Circuit
The “Hard Beat” video, shot with cinematographer Owen Smith-Clark, is as loaded as the track. Boy Harsher cite Helmut Newton’s 1995 High and Mighty feature and the queer punk of Gregg Araki as touchstones, and the result follows a deviant couple down a highway through a parade of surreal figures, all surveillance, desire, and surrendered control.
Critics have already clocked how closely it rhymes with Anton Corbijn’s clip for Depeche Mode’s “Behind the Wheel,” down to the injured leg, the vintage car, and the woman taking over the driving, though Boy Harsher push the idea somewhere harder and more confrontational.
The rollout stays true to their roots even on a major. Before the album lands, the duo bring their Nude Club party to Paragon in Brooklyn on July 25 and Milky’s in Los Angeles on August 7, previewing new material in exactly the kind of rooms that built them.
A North American headline tour follows, opening September 25 in Hudson and running through Boston, Montreal, Chicago, Los Angeles, Las Vegas, and New Orleans before closing at New York’s Knockdown Center, with support across select dates from Choir Boy, Evanora Unlimited, True Blue, and Kassie Krut. There is a debut feature film, The Lonely Woman, in the works too, starring Chloë Sevigny, FKA twigs, and Sturgill Simpson. Whatever ended in 2024, the band did not.
