Boy Harsher release GET MEAN, the album they made after the couple became a band

Boy Harsher have released GET MEAN, an album made in the space left by a relationship ending while the working partnership carried on.

Jae Matthews and Augustus Muller were a couple as well as a duo. They ended the romantic side of it in 2024 and decided to keep the band going, which is a rarer choice than the reverse and a harder one to make work. The record is out now through Atlantic Records.

What that decision produced is twelve tracks about heartbreak, loss and carrying on, written by two people who had to keep turning up to the studio for each other. Clash describes it as an open and difficult listen, which is about right for a record where the subject and the working arrangement are the same thing.

The recording was scattered. Eight locations across the United States, Mexico and Italy went into it, and the reference points Clash picks out range from Metric to OMD, which puts the album further towards pop than the cold wave the duo built their name on.

That recalibration is the musical story here. Boy Harsher spent a decade making synth music whose coldness was the point, and GET MEAN keeps the machinery while letting some warmth through it. Grief tends to do that to a sound designed to keep feeling at arm's length.

The band have been building to this all year, releasing Tough Luck (When You Don't Call) in August ahead of the album.

Boy Harsher open a UK run at London's Roundhouse on 29 November. Releases as they land are collected on the release calendar, and more electronic coverage sits on our genre hub.