Ahead of the release of their new album GET MEAN, due September 18 via Atlantic Records, Boy Harsher have shared their latest single and visualizer, “Tough Luck (When You Don’t Call).” The new track offers another glimpse into the duo’s forthcoming record, a deeply personal exploration of love, loss, heartbreak, and survival.
Tough Luck (When You Don’t Call) follows the previously released singles “Jeans” and “Hard Beat,” both of which arrived alongside music videos directed by Boy Harsher. Built around upbeat synth lines and shimmering disco rhythms, the new single creates an almost euphoric backdrop for Jae Matthews’ wounded, heart-on-the-sleeve vocals. The contrast between the song’s buoyant production and its emotional subject matter makes the heartbreak at its center feel even more pronounced.
Boy Harsher also recently wrapped two intimate shows in New York City and Los Angeles, where the duo performed select material from the forthcoming album. Dirty Magazine covered the New York City performance at Paragon.
At its core, GET MEAN is a meditation on love, loss, and survival. Across twelve tracks, Jae Matthews and Augustus Muller confront grief and heartbreak while tracing the difficult process of moving through loss and finding a path toward renewal. The album ultimately emerges as a redemption record—a document of one of the most painful chapters of their lives and the strength found on the other side.
In early 2024, after years of increasingly acclaimed releases, ambitious collaborations, cross-genre experimentation, and extensive worldwide touring, Boy Harsher faced the end of Matthews and Muller’s romantic relationship. The breakup arrived alongside a period marked by personal turmoil, familial loss, and creative uncertainty, leaving the future of the band unclear and the idea of making new music seemingly distant.
For Matthews, it was a period of movement and self-discovery that eventually reignited the writing process. Traveling through West Texas, the Pacific Northwest, South Florida, and other parts of the United States, she began confronting a shifting sense of identity and the loneliness that followed the collapse of a relationship at the center of the band’s creative life.
That experience became the foundation for GET MEAN, a record born from rootlessness and questions about what remains when intimacy, familiarity, and certainty disappear.
The resulting album finds Boy Harsher expanding their established darkwave and electronic palette. While the duo has long relied on classical synth textures, coldwave rhythms, and deeply confessional lyrics, GET MEAN introduces new sonic elements ranging from softly detuned pads and squelching leads to pedal-steel pitch bends, raw cellphone voice notes, New Romantic guitar textures, and unexpected pop flourishes.
The album’s first single, “Jeans,” takes a tongue-in-cheek approach to Americana, self-actualization, and the pursuit of success, reframing familiar cultural imagery through the lens of gig-work alienation and modern economic uncertainty.
Matthews describes GET MEAN as “what I had to give during the most extreme period of my life.” That emotional upheaval runs throughout the album, which was recorded across eight locations spanning the United States, Mexico, and Italy.
The record has consequently become Boy Harsher’s “road album,” with its environments and circumstances becoming part of the music itself. The Florida scrub, icy Northwest rivers, highways, and unfamiliar landscapes all feed into an album that moves between grief, confusion, humor, desire, and eventual release.
That journey is reflected in “Hard Beat,” where Matthews moves between confession and self-reclamation. The song captures the band’s ability to transform personal pain into dancefloor catharsis, turning dislocation and uncertainty into something physical and liberating.
Following the album’s release, Boy Harsher will embark on a North American headline tour this fall. The tour begins in Hudson on September 25 and will travel through Boston, Montreal, Chicago, Los Angeles, Las Vegas, New Orleans, and other cities before concluding at New York City’s Knockdown Center. Choir Boy, Evanora Unlimited, True Blue, and Kassie Krut will provide support on select dates, with multiple shows already sold out.
Since forming in 2014, Jae Matthews and Augustus Muller have built one of underground music’s most devoted followings as Boy Harsher. Their debut EP Lesser Man, featuring the underground favorite “Pain,” was initially released in a limited cassette run before being uploaded to YouTube by a fan and finding a much wider audience.
The duo continued that momentum with the Yr Body Is Nothing LP in 2016 and Country Girl EP in 2017, followed by the acclaimed 2019 album Careful and their 2022 album and film The Runner, which they wrote, produced, and scored.
Over the course of their career, Boy Harsher have continually expanded the possibilities of darkwave, industrial, and electronic music. Their combination of hypnotic synthesizers, propulsive rhythms, and Matthews’ magnetic vocals has helped bring minimal synth, EBM, and darker electronic sounds from underground clubs to festival stages worldwide.
The duo’s cinematic ambitions are also expanding beyond music. Boy Harsher are currently working on their debut feature film, The Lonely Woman, starring Chloë Sevigny, FKA twigs, and Sturgill Simpson.
GET MEAN arrives September 18 via Atlantic Records. With “Tough Luck (When You Don’t Call)” offering another emotionally charged preview, Boy Harsher are preparing to enter a new chapter defined by heartbreak, reinvention, and the cathartic power of the dancefloor.
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