For Boy Harsher, breaking up came with a practical complication: the person on the other side of it was also the other half of the band. Vocalist Jae Matthews and producer Augustus Muller ended their romantic relationship in early 2024, leaving the future of their collaboration uncertain. Their answer arrives with Get Mean.
The 12-track record took shape across eight locations in the US, Mexico and Italy, following a period in which Matthews travelled and spent time alone. That scattered geography feels appropriate to a project made while the terms of the partnership were being rewritten. In the album announcement, Matthews described it as “what I had to give during the most extreme period of my life.”
Speaking to Synth History, Matthews explained that Muller would send instrumentals while she was travelling; she recorded rough vocals and sent them back. Songs developed through those exchanges. Muller also recalled finding a guitar in a studio after the record had already been tracked, then revisiting songs to replace synthesizer leads.
Matthews and Muller met while studying film in Savannah, Georgia, and began releasing music as Boy Harsher in 2014. Their Lesser Man EP started as a small cassette run; Yr Body Is Nothing followed in 2016, then Careful in 2019. Their rise through darkwave and industrial music grew from a collaboration that had cinema built into it from the beginning.
By 2022, they were making the relationship between sound and image literal with The Runner, a short horror film they wrote, produced and directed, accompanied by their own soundtrack. Its fiction was intercut with staged documentary material about Boy Harsher’s recording process.
Their cinematic ambitions extend to The Lonely Woman, their announced first feature, with a cast including Chloë Sevigny, FKA twigs and Sturgill Simpson. Set in rural New England, the horror-thriller concerns a woman haunted by the death of her first love. The persistence of an absent lover clearly has a place in their fiction, too.
