Boy Harsher have announced Get Mean, their first new album since the 2022 film and soundtrack The Runner. Due September 18 via Atlantic Records, the twelve-track album follows Jae Matthews and Augustus Muller through the breakup of their romantic relationship, a period of familial loss and creative uncertainty, and the difficult decision to continue Boy Harsher together.
Alongside the announcement, the duo have unveiled “Hard Beat,” a lean, driving darkwave track accompanied by a Boy Harsher-directed video about surveillance, deviance, desire, and trauma. Where June’s “Jeans” introduced their return through wiry new wave guitar and western detail, “Hard Beat” bears down on the machinery that first made Boy Harsher such a commanding presence in clubs: a catchy bass-synth figure, an unrelenting kick drum, and Matthews’ voice cutting through the track like cold air rushing through an open car window.
One cannot help but hear a trace of Depeche Mode’s “Behind the Wheel” in its fusion of movement, erotic surrender, and mechanical repetition. Boy Harsher pushes that feeling toward a harder, more body-driven strain of darkwave, with the bass carrying the physical weight while Matthews slips between confession, invitation, and command. The highway becomes both an escape route and a place where control can abruptly change hands.
Directed by Boy Harsher with cinematography from Owen Smith-Clark, the video draws from Helmut Newton’s 1995 “High and Mighty” feature and the sexually charged queer punk cinema of Gregg Araki. It opens inside a windowless room lined with yellowed tiles, where an old CRT television displays Angel Zinovieff seated in a wheelchair. The image soon cuts from the monitor to Zinovieff herself, dressed in black with one leg held inside an elaborate metal brace. Rods and clamps run along her fishnet-covered limb, turning an orthopedic device into something between medical apparatus, restraint, and severe fetishwear.
The camera studies the brace in close-up before moving to the controls of a vintage Cadillac tearing along a nearly deserted highway at night. Metal joints, pedals, switches, leather gloves, and the car’s gear selector enter into a visual correspondence with the hardware fastened around Zinovieff’s leg. The human body and the automobile appear as related machines, each capable of movement while remaining subject to whoever controls its mechanisms.
Inside the Cadillac, Cheeky Ma and Mo Stark play the two “freaky deviants” hurtling through the blue-black night. The driver smokes, laughs, paws at the dashboard, and turns a handheld MiniDV camcorder on the other occupants, its mounted light firing directly into their faces. At moments, the camcorder is raised with the casual recklessness of someone filming a party while driving; elsewhere, its bright eye takes on the invasive force of an interrogation lamp. Rings, lacquered nails, facial piercings, glossy fabric, and black leather crowd the frame as passing streetlights sweep across the interior.
Jae Matthews occupies the backseat beneath a black funeral veil. Red and green light divide her face behind the netting as she sings directly toward the lens, sometimes alone and sometimes pressed close against another veiled figure. The mesh softens and fractures their features, lending the encounters an uneasy intimacy: a kiss, a threat, and an identification photograph can seem separated by only a few frames. Matthews remains a passenger, yet her fixed gaze and repeated appeals to “make it real” steadily pull the car’s disorder around her.
The highway is continually fed back into the tiled room through the CRT monitor. At first, the television shows Zinovieff in her wheelchair; it later carries the empty road, faces from the Cadillac, and camcorder images stamped with a red recording indicator and apparent geographic coordinates. Those transfers make it increasingly difficult to determine who is watching whom. The people in the Cadillac document each other, the closed-circuit system observes the room, and the video finally points its cameras outward at the audience.
Under choreography by performance artist Monica Mirabile of FLUCT, Zinovieff’s physical restraint develops into a violent, increasingly expansive dance. She folds at the waist, whips her hair, claws at her clothing, arches backward, and strikes the tiled walls with open palms. Her movements carry the strain of a body fighting both its enclosure and the device attached to it. The editing cuts these gestures against the Cadillac’s acceleration, collapsing stillness and speed into the same state of agitation.
Blue highway footage, sickly green tiles, sudden red washes, and overexposed camcorder glare keep the two locations visually connected. As the song intensifies, the cuts become faster and the images less stable: veiled faces double against one another, the driver leans toward the camera with a feral grin, Zinovieff’s hair lashes across her face, and the road stretches ahead without revealing a destination. Near the end, the Cadillac is viewed from outside, with its occupants compressed behind the windshield and Matthews’ veiled face visible within the moving vehicle. The car continues through the darkness as though escape itself has become another form of confinement.
The video also sharpens the track’s resemblance to Depeche Mode’s “Behind the Wheel.” Anton Corbijn’s film famously presents Dave Gahan with an injured leg and crutches before a woman assumes control of the journey. “Hard Beat” rearranges that imagery around Zinovieff’s brace, the vintage Cadillac, female control, and the unstable line between passenger and captive. Those shared elements—bodily injury, roadway travel, erotic power, and surrendered agency—make the connection unusually specific, while Boy Harsher drives the idea into a harder and more openly confrontational setting.
The MiniDV camcorder establishes another suggestive post-punk reference. Its repeated appearance in “Hard Beat,” together with Nathaniel Jerome’s promotional portrait of Gus Muller pointing a camcorder directly at the viewer while Matthews stands behind him, immediately recalls the artwork and promotional campaign for New Order’s 2001 album Get Ready. Photographed by Jürgen Teller under Peter Saville’s art direction, that campaign similarly placed a handheld camera between its subject and audience. With Boy Harsher calling their album Get Mean, another clipped two-word imperative beginning with “Get,” the parallel feels likely intentional, even though the duo have not explicitly confirmed it. Here, New Order’s invitation to be prepared becomes Boy Harsher’s warning to toughen up.
Watch the video for Hard Beat below:
Get Mean began during a period when the continuation of Boy Harsher was far from assured. In early 2024, after years of international touring, increasingly ambitious collaborations, and projects that moved between music and film, Matthews and Muller ended their relationship. The separation followed personal turmoil, family loss, and a creative block that left the prospect of another album feeling remote.
The situation confronted the pair with questions that reached beyond the ordinary mechanics of making another record:
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?
Writing resumed when Matthews took to the road, moving through West Texas, the Pacific Northwest, South Florida, and points between. That unsettled geography became part of the album itself. Described as Boy Harsher’s “road album,” Get Mean was recorded across eight locations in the United States, Mexico, and Italy, gathering cellphone voice notes, environmental fragments, and changing emotional states along the way.
Matthews describes the album as:
“what I had to give during the most extreme period of my life.”
Across its twelve tracks, the familiar coldwave propulsion of Boy Harsher meets detuned pads, squelching synth leads, pedal-steel bends, New Romantic guitar, percussive jokes, and unadorned recordings captured on a phone. Those additions allow grief and exhaustion to coexist with flirtation, humor, and the possibility of beginning again. The record follows the collapse of one form of intimacy while testing whether another—the creative bond between Matthews and Muller—can survive it.
Get Mean arrives September 18 via Atlantic Records. Pre-order and pre-save the album here.
Matthews and Muller formed Boy Harsher in 2014 after meeting while studying film in Savannah. Their first EP, Lesser Man, began as a small cassette release before the track “Pain” spread widely online. The duo followed it with Yr Body Is Nothing in 2016, the Country Girl EP in 2017, and Careful in 2019. Their filmmaking background came fully into view with The Runner, the 2022 horror film and accompanying soundtrack that they wrote, produced, directed, and scored.
Their cinematic work continues with The Lonely Woman, their forthcoming feature-length horror thriller starring Chloë Sevigny, FKA twigs, Sturgill Simpson, Will Oldham, and Jake Weary. Boy Harsher are directing the film and providing its score.
Following the release of Get Mean, Boy Harsher will begin an extensive North American headline tour before continuing through Europe and the United Kingdom. The itinerary includes sold-out two-night runs in Chicago and Portland, a sold-out Los Angeles appearance at the Hollywood Palladium, and a London headline show at the Roundhouse.
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Boy Harsher Live Dates
09/25 — Hudson, NY — Basilica Hudson
09/27 — Boston, MA — Royale
09/29 — Montreal, QC — MTELUS
09/30 — Toronto, ON — Danforth Music Hall
10/01 — Detroit, MI — Majestic Theatre
10/02 — Chicago, IL — Metro — Sold Out
10/03 — Chicago, IL — Metro — Sold Out
10/04 — Minneapolis, MN — Varsity Theater
10/06 — Denver, CO — Summit
10/09 — Portland, OR — Revolution Hall — Sold Out
10/10 — Portland, OR — Revolution Hall — Sold Out
10/11 — Seattle, WA — The Showbox — Sold Out
10/12 — Seattle, WA — The Showbox
10/13 — Vancouver, BC — The Pearl — Sold Out
10/15 — Oakland, CA — Fox Theater
10/16 — Los Angeles, CA — Hollywood Palladium — Sold Out
10/17 — Del Mar, CA — The Sound
10/18 — Santa Ana, CA — Observatory Festival Grounds — Sold Out
10/20 — Las Vegas, NV — House of Blues
10/21 — Phoenix, AZ — The Van Buren
10/24 — Fort Worth, TX — Sick New World
10/26 — New Orleans, LA — Republic NOLA
10/27 — Atlanta, GA — Variety Playhouse
10/28 — Asheville, NC — The Orange Peel
10/30 — Washington, DC — The Howard Theatre
10/31 — Philadelphia, PA — Making Time
11/05 — New York, NY — Knockdown Center
11/14 — Lyon, France — Le Transbordeur
11/15 — Paris, France — Bataclan
11/16 — Strasbourg, France — La Laiterie
11/17 — Frankfurt, Germany — Zoom
11/18 — Lausanne, Switzerland — Docks
11/19 — Munich, Germany — Kesselhaus
11/20 — Vienna, Austria — Ottakringer Brauerei
11/21 — Leipzig, Germany — Felsenkeller
11/22 — Berlin, Germany — Columbiahalle
11/24 — Hamburg, Germany — Gruenspan
11/25 — Cologne, Germany — Essigfabrik
11/26 — Amsterdam, Netherlands — Paradiso
11/27 — Lille, France — L’Aéronef
11/28 — Nantes, France — Warehouse
11/29 — London, UK — Roundhouse
12/01 — Manchester, UK — Ritz
12/02 — Glasgow, UK — SWG3 TV Studio
12/03 — Bristol, UK — Bristol Electric at SWX
12/04 — Antwerp, Belgium — De Roma
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