Boy Harsher’s ‘GET MEAN’ Wants You To Dance Through the Darkness
As the sun begins to set earlier, and the temperature drops, the feeling of summer has officially begun to fade. There’s no better way to prepare for the familiar chill of fall air than with a brand new Boy Harsher album. With roughly 150,000 videos under the official sound for their 2014 track “Pain”, the Massachusetts-based duo have become a staple in the modern dark wave scene. It’s been four years since their last album The Runner, a soundtrack to an experimental horror short written and directed by the duo themselves of the same name. Previously a romantic couple, Jae Matthews and Augustus Muller have been performing as Boy Harsher for well over a decade ago and show no signs of slowing down with new release GET MEAN.
The lead single of this new era, “Hard Beat”, has most of the components that made Boy Harsher what they are: moody vocals, intense synths, an entrancing bass line, and a tense beat that keeps the track clean and contained. However, with a rhythm that is intensely energetic, a feature so unlike most of their previous releases, the single establishes itself as the first step in a brand new direction, sonically.
We’re introduced to the world of GET MEAN with the opening track “Ronny”, a new wave-style ballad. We’re also immediately greeted with the lyrical pain that is seeped into every track on the record, with Matthews finishing every verse and chorus with a sense of deep desire, saying “I wanna see inside of you”. The rest of the track is filled with concepts of coping, such as betting on dogs at a race track, or meeting with a junkie to indulge in poison. Her final plea, however, opens the rest of the album with a candor that follows through to the very end with “Touch me / Feel me / I wanna be inside you.”
The post-punk influences ring louder than ever across the entire record, which works with the vulnerable lyricism to give us Boy Harsher at their most honest. Tracks “Faulty” and “Ice Pick (Walk Away)” are the most prominent examples of this shift. Where the duo would have typically used minimal synths to communicate her existential questioning of loneliness and separation, they now use driving beats to create dark dance tracks. A lively synth and a high-tempo snare accompany Matthew’s uncertainty as she muses, “Are we better off alone? / Will I come into my own? / Are we better off alone?” in “Faulty”.
Track 10, “Pray 4 Me,” presents itself as a dialogue, with Matthews’ typical sensual low register vocals juxtaposing a high-tempo pop instrumental. Her melancholic confessional is carried by an ethereal pop synth, acting almost as a thesis for the record as a whole. In all its gloomy lyricism, the music leans heavily into an electro-pop sound. While much of this record is an introspection of self, you can’t help but want to dance to the noise that cuts through. This infectious dichotomy is stretched across the album as a whole, with nearly all of the tracks straying away from the duo’s typical minimalistic beats and low synths.
Perhaps the most confessional track on the record: “Ivy’s Spiral”, is a forty four second spoken word interlude. The instrumental is a one note drone, as Matthews speaks as though her closest friends are listening on the other end of a call line. It’s a truthful and vulnerable update as the ninth track on the album, detailing her moving forward after a spiral. In the second half of the track she says, “...And then eventually I just like stopped caring. I felt like if I could think of that person’s name and my stomach didn’t do a somersault, then I knew I was fine.” Tonally, its a break in the album, but the content of this short interruption of music is a metaphorical water break. From track to track, the record is taking us on a musical journey that weighs heavier on the heart and ears than meets the surface.
The final track on the album, “Bleed” leans into a 90’s industrial inspired instrumental. With warped synth sounds and tense trip-hop beats, it's a more high-energy finale than to be expected, yet it fits perfectly. The entire record is an emotional tug-of-war, with the exploration of grief never truly finding its footing. The music itself is the redemption that Matthews’ is begging for throughout the entire record. Although the lyrics across the album are begging for clarity and exploring the deepest pains of heartbreak, the response is that newfound energetic synth.
