Boy Harsher get lean and focused on their best album yet

Jae Matthews and Augustus Muller have faced a succession of gravity-shifting events in recent years, stretching from loss to creative block and then the break-up of their own relationship. Clearly the future of Boy Harsher was in doubt and yet, here we are with the duo's first new music since 2022's soundtrack for The Runner.

Desolate cinematic vistas, bleached landscapes, the loneliness of the open road: you can taste the dislocation and the desperation. Yet for all the emotional intensity, Get Mean is some seriously compelling and very danceable synth-pop, with some guaranteed darkwave floor-fillers. Boy Harsher have created the best music of their career without sacrificing anything, musically speaking. Instead the songs are stronger, the sonic palette richer and more inviting.

The result is a lean and focused album, with no lulls and where no track overstays its welcome. Kicking off with the wide-open soundscape of “Ronny”, there's a roadworn weariness, yes, but the glistening synths march on while Matthews’ perfectly enunciated heartbreak meshes with movie soundtrack drop-ins. Her vocals have a magnetic, sensual quality, without tricks or vocal affectations, giving a sense of her inhabiting the songs more deeply than before.

Recent single “Tough Luck (When You Don’t Call)” is lyrically explicit when it brutally asks, “Do you feel the regret? Do you even know my name?,” while “Jeans” feels almost carefree in comparison, where the clouds part and escape is possible, even if it’s moving to the big city “just to sell jeans.” Stylistically, we’re in the territory staked out by New Order at their most upbeat. That it gives way to the relentless motorik of “Break Me” with its barely contained sense of hysteria highlights how important careful sequencing can be.

“Ivy’s Spiral” is a forty-four second spoken word description of the little victories you hope for as you claw your way out of grieving a severed relationship. It’s hard not to take it at face value – whether you do or not may depend on your own experience – but it’s all part of a musical and emotional reality Boy Harsher sketch out with an efficiency that, in the wrong hands, could translate as clinical but is instead consistently devastating.

Much has been said about suffering for your art but it still remains an awkward conversation. Closing with the haunting, aching “Bleed” you’re left wondering: is it voyeuristic to enjoy the results of someone else’s anguish? Not when the music is this great and the emotions so universal that you may well be left assessing your own life and choices, and maybe clutching Get Mean closer in the months and years to come.