Boy Harsher

Film school in Savannah, then a move north

Boy Harsher began in Savannah, Georgia, where Jae Matthews and Augustus Muller met on the film programme at the Savannah College of Art and Design. Their first project together, running from 2013, was called Teen Dreamz: Matthews reading spoken-word pieces over Muller's backing. The Boy Harsher name replaced it in 2014, and the pair have kept the same division of labour ever since — Matthews on voice and text, Muller on machines.

They relocated to Northampton, Massachusetts, where they still live and work, and where the debut album was made. The music has always been built from few parts: a hard drum pattern, a bass synth, a small amount of melody, and a vocal that moves between singing, muttering and shrieking. The film training never went away either, and it eventually surfaced as more than an influence.

The two also run Nude Club, a label they set up for their own records and for artists around them. That independence shaped the first decade of the band and made the 2026 move to a major label a genuine change of footing rather than a formality.

Four records and a horror short

The debut, Yr Body Is Nothing, came out in 2016 on DKA Records and set the template — cheap-sounding, physical, closer to EBM than to synth-pop. Careful followed in 2019 and remains the record most listeners arrive through; it sharpened the writing without softening the sound, and songs from it still anchor the live set. Country Girl Uncut, also 2019, collected earlier and unreleased material.

Instead of a fifth album, the next release was a soundtrack. The Runner, a short horror film written, produced and directed by the duo and shot on 16mm, premiered in January 2022 on Shudder alongside an eight-track score. Speaking to Crack Magazine that month, Muller framed it as a product of the shutdown: two years of heavy touring had just ended, and the pandemic pushed the band inward. Matthews, who was diagnosed with multiple sclerosis after the onset of the pandemic, described being drawn to the film's monster because she believed everyone contains one.

That detour turned out to be the last Boy Harsher release for four and a half years.

GET MEAN

Matthews and Muller ended their romantic relationship in early 2024, and by their own account the band's future was in doubt — the break-up arrived alongside family bereavement and a period of creative block. Writing started later that year. The album that came out of it, GET MEAN, is twelve tracks recorded across eight locations in the United States, Mexico and Italy, with Matthews feeding in phone recordings gathered travelling through West Texas, the Pacific Northwest and South Florida.

It is released on 18 September 2026 and was announced on 21 July as their first for Atlantic Records; the band's own Bandcamp page still lists Nude Club. The duo call it a redemption album, a document of a painful chapter and of what was left afterwards. The palette is wider than before: detuned pads, new-wave guitar and pedal-steel sit next to the usual bass-synth and drum machine.

Three singles preceded it. "Jeans" arrived in June 2026, "Hard Beat" on 21 July with a video the band directed themselves alongside cinematographer Owen Smith-Clark, cutting a night highway sequence against surveillance footage, and "Tough Luck (When You Don't Call)" in late August. The tracklist runs from the opener "Ronny" through "Break Me", "Faulty", "Coming Home", "Ice Pick (Walk Away)", a 44-second spoken-word interlude called "Ivy's Spiral", "Pray 4 Me" and "Falling", closing on "Bleed".

The first substantial review landed on 14 September 2026, when Simon Heavisides gave the album 8/10 in The Line of Best Fit, calling it lean and focused with no lulls, noting a New Order influence and describing the result as compelling, danceable synth-pop with several tracks built to fill a floor.

The Heartbreak Tour

Tickets for the North American run went on sale at 10am local time on 12 June 2026, before the album had even been announced. Billed as The Heartbreak Tour, the main leg opens at Basilica Hudson in Hudson, New York on 25 September — a week after release — and closes at Knockdown Center in Queens on 5 November.

The routing takes in Boston, Montreal, Toronto, Detroit, Minneapolis, Denver, Vancouver, Oakland, Los Angeles, Del Mar, Las Vegas, Phoenix, Fort Worth, New Orleans, Atlanta, Asheville, Washington DC and Philadelphia, with two-night stands at Metro in Chicago, Revolution Hall in Portland and The Showbox in Seattle. Several dates had sold out before the album arrived. Support rotates between Choir Boy, Evanora Unlimited, True Blue and Kassie Krut depending on the city.

Two festival appointments sit inside the run: Fort Worth on 24 October forms part of Sick New World, and on 18 October the band play beneath Turnstile at The Observatory Festival Grounds in Santa Ana. No European or UK dates have been announced for this cycle.

The band tested the new material twice before the tour proper, at Nude Club parties — Paragon in Brooklyn on 25 July, co-hosted with Pretty But Wicked, and Milky's in Los Angeles on 7 August, both with DJ sets from guests including Chanel Beads and Jessy Lanza.

What still ends the night

Boy Harsher sets have been remarkably consistent in shape over several years. The tracking site Setlist.fm puts the average at a little over an hour, and recent full headline shows bear that out: Stubb's Bar-B-Q in Austin on 25 September 2025 ran 9.30pm to 10.35pm across thirteen songs plus an encore, while festival slots have been trimmed to ten or eleven — Release Athens on 27 June 2025 ran 8pm to 8.55pm, Portola in San Francisco on 21 September 2025 and III Points in Miami that October both sitting around the same length.

The furniture of the set is largely fixed. "Come Closer" has now been played over a hundred times, with "Westerners" and "Modulations" close behind; "Fate", "Tower", "Tears", "LA" and "Give Me a Reason" recur, and "Keep Driving" has opened most recent shows. The 2026 Brooklyn warm-up was a deliberate break from that — a 1.30am, 35-minute, five-song set of "Hard Beat", "Jeans", "LA", "Come Closer" and "Pain".

The staging has not changed much since the band's first big rooms. Reviewing Heaven in London on 4 March 2019, The Electricity Club described Muller near-motionless behind his electronics, hitting the occasional drum pad, while Matthews took the stage alone in blocks of fog-lit red, blue, yellow and green; "Fate" drew the first real roar and "Modulations" the loudest of the night.

The next thing is a feature film

Alongside the record, the duo are developing their first full-length feature, The Lonely Woman, with Chloë Sevigny, FKA twigs and Sturgill Simpson attached. No release date has been announced. Given that the last gap between albums was filled by a short film rather than a record, it is a reasonable guess that the film, not another album, is what follows this tour — though the band have not said so.