There’s a fine line between a love song and a breakup song. For darkwave duo Boy Harsher, the expected tropes for either can mutate over time: love songs mangled by barbed wire; breakup songs given sun-drenched, VistaVision views. Longtime creative and romantic partners Jae Matthews and Augustus Muller, who have been making music as Boy Harsher for over a decade, technically released their first breakup record in 2014: the simmering Lesser Man EP, which contained underground club hit “Pain.” Matthews and Muller recorded the project in their Savannah, Georgia, home after a whirlwind courtship, split, and eventual reunion. “Every song was very much about feeling betrayed or hurt or shook around or desiring something that’s not good for you,” Matthews recalled in a 2017 interview.
Lesser Man introduced Boy Harsher’s shadowy, sinister dance music, layering Mueller’s industrial drones, plasticky beats, and acidic synths under Matthews’ morphine-drip vocals. The band crystallized that sound on 2016 LP Yr Body Is Nothing and 2019’s Careful, accumulating a cult following along the way. On GET MEAN, Boy Harsher’s Atlantic debut and their first studio album in seven years, Matthews and Muller process the end of their romantic relationship, familial loss, and a period of rootlessness.
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The spaces that GET MEAN evokes are distinct from Boy Harsher’s previous work. Releases like Lesser Man, Yr Body Is Nothing, and Careful are distinctly indoor records. Deep indoors. Most of Boy Harsher’s music sounds like it was recorded in a bunker rave buried just above the gates to Hell. There has always been a grimy intimacy to their songs—a delicious claustrophobia that made you feel like you were pressed against sweaty limbs and Matthews’ breath was tickling the back of your neck. On GET MEAN, Boy Harsher break through those confines for a more sweeping scope and ’80s pop palette—to varying results. In cuts that toy with ’80s synth-pop conventions, Boy Harsher get a little lost in repetitive melodies and studio polish. Matthews and Muller sound most in sync on the dark and dingy coldwave tracks that aren’t disguised in acid-wash denim.
Lead single “Jeans” is the least effective deviation from Boy Harsher’s darker, muckier sound. Peppy but repetitive, the song bounces along to a tinny guitar lick that only highlights how indistinguishable the verses are from the chorus. Muller punches in pedal-steel pitchbends, a ka-chinging cash register, and a digital whip! effect, but the song never blooms into anything intriguing. It feels endless and flat and a bit too long, like a stretch of highway slicing through the Midwest.
It’s no accident that several of the tracks on GET MEAN sound like they should be blaring through a car stereo. Deeming it their “road album” in press materials, Boy Harsher recorded the LP in numerous locations across the United States as well as Mexico and Italy. Matthews collected her own itinerant inspiration, motoring around the country and stopping in West Texas, South Florida, and the Pacific Northwest while metabolizing her break from Muller and a period of personal turmoil (including a diagnosis of multiple sclerosis).
