Boy Harsher’s new single, Hard Beat, arrives with news of Get Mean, the duo’s first conventional studio album since Careful in 2019, due September 18th, 2026 through Atlantic Records.
Hard Beat operates with the disciplined minimalism at the heart of Boy Harsher’s music. Augustus Muller constructs a tense framework from a muscular bass sequence, sparse synthesizers and a kick that never loosens its grip, while Jae Matthews delivers each line with an elusive mixture of vulnerability and authority. The arrangement may be minimal, but its repetition generates a mounting sensation of speed, danger and erotic compulsion.
The same tension runs through the band-directed video, filmed by cinematographer Owen Smith-Clark. Matthews rides through the night in a vintage Cadillac, her face partly hidden behind a funeral veil as the passengers turn their cameras on one another. In a separate, decaying tiled room, the protagonist moves frantically with one leg trapped inside a heavy metal brace. As the two scenes begin to overlap, bodies and machinery seem to become part of the same restless system.
Get Mean emerged from an especially turbulent chapter for Matthews and Muller. Following the end of their romantic relationship, the pair confronted bereavement, creative paralysis and the question of whether Boy Harsher could continue at all. Recorded across eight locations in the United States, Mexico and Italy, the resulting twelve-track record has been characterized as both a breakup album and a road album.
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Boy Harsher
Photography by Jordan Hemingway
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