Boy Harsher announces their new album GET MEAN due September 18th. 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. Pre-order here.
Alongside the album announcement, Boy Harsher shares the new single and music video “Hard Beat.” Listen here
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.
Upcoming Live UK Dates
London: The Roundhouse – Sunday, November 29, 2026
Manchester: O2 Ritz Manchester – Tuesday, December 1, 2026
Glasgow: SWG3 TV Studio – Wednesday, December 2, 2026
Bristol: Electric Bristol (SWX) – Thursday, December 3, 2026
Comments are closed.