Are we better off alone
Will I come into my own
Are we better off alone
Being understood by someone is a comfort until the relationship ends and their imagined opinion starts conducting an inspection of everything wrong with you. Boy Harsher’s Faulty inhabits that uncomfortable interval between asking to be wanted and wondering what that wanting has cost. Jae Matthews sings as though the verdict may already be in, while Augustus Muller gives her doubts enough room to move. The question of being better off alone becomes something to turn over on the dancefloor, where thinking clearly has always been optional.
The song accompanies the release of Get Mean, out now following its September 18 arrival through Atlantic Records. Their first album since 2022’s The Runner, the twelve-track record follows the end of Matthews and Muller’s romantic relationship in early 2024, after a period of family loss, personal upheaval, and creative uncertainty. Continuing the band meant finding a way to work together while the terms of their lives were changing. That makes the tenderness of Faulty particularly affecting: the people making this music understand how complicated its questions can become.
A kicking beat, busy hi-hats, and quivering synths set Faulty in motion. Its dark disco rhythm has some of Careful’s physical insistence, softened by broad synth pads and little descending electronic notes that drop through the arrangement with a rounded, almost playful boop. When the beat pauses to breathe, the synths take on a Vangelis-like warble, briefly opening the song into something more spacious and cinematic. The rhythm returns beneath a lead synth that bends up and down in pitch, while Matthews keeps her voice hushed and close, breathing the words with a tenderness that borders on resignation.
The lyrics put affection and self-assessment in an uncomfortable room together. Asking whether she is faulty gives another person the power to diagnose her; asking whether she will come into her own begins to take some of that power back. Repetition keeps either possibility from becoming a settled conclusion. Matthews sounds caught between wanting to be held and recognizing how much of herself might be waiting outside the relationship.
Directed by Boy Harsher and shot on 35mm with cinematography by Owen Smith-Clark, the final video in the Get Mean series returns to a room lined in brown wood paneling. A television glows blue on a black stand, a small fan sits by the window, and a microphone cable trails across the carpet. Against that ordinary setting, the changing cast look dressed for entirely different evenings: a white cowboy hat, metallic bodysuits, striped knitwear, black boots. Each person seems to have brought a private version of the same bad night.
The camera moves from fixed views of the room into close-ups of faces, hands, and bodies moving past one another. People share the frame, lean together, or briefly touch, but proximity never quite settles the question in the chorus. There is a lovely awkwardness to it: the self-consciousness of dancing at home, followed by the sudden absorption of forgetting you are being watched. By the end, the people have gone and the television is still there. The room has held all that feeling without offering anyone an answer.
Watch the video for Faulty below:
Across Get Mean, the effort to keep going takes several musical forms. Writing began to move again when Matthews took to the road, travelling through West Texas, the Pacific Northwest, and South Florida. The album was eventually recorded in eight locations across the United States, Mexico, and Italy, its unsettled circumstances allowing new sounds and approaches into the duo’s work. Matthews describes it as “what I had to give during the most extreme period of my life.” The three singles we covered ahead of its release made clear how much that offering could contain.
The first indication came with Jeans, released in June. Its springy guitar figure and bubbling electronics brought a new wave directness to Boy Harsher, with a steel-slide twang giving the song a western accent. Our earlier comparison to the Pretenders still fits the way Matthews’ cool delivery rides that guitar, while the buoyancy also suggests Muller’s work in Safe Mind. Beneath the cheek is a sharp little study of ambition: the dream of escaping a small town, the dream of becoming somebody, and the possibility of ending up selling an image of freedom by the pair. The band’s latex line-dancing video, conceived with Robert Palmer’s Addicted to Love in mind, makes that collision between aspiration, performance, and merchandise deliciously literal.
Hard Beat, unveiled alongside July’s album announcement, tightens the pressure around a repeating bass-synth figure and an unrelenting kick. As we noted then, there is something of Depeche Mode’s Behind the Wheel in its meeting of motion, desire, and surrendered control. Matthews moves between confession and invitation while the rhythm keeps pushing ahead. Its video makes those exchanges physical through an elaborate leg brace, a Cadillac, and a handheld camcorder, drawing medical hardware, automotive controls, and the invasive act of filming into the same uneasy visual language. Within the album, the track preserves the severe club momentum that has long served Boy Harsher so well, giving the softer and more openly melodic songs something solid to push against.
August’s Tough Luck (When You Don’t Call) puts a warmer arrangement around the indignity of waiting for someone to remember you exist. A brisk new wave beat, rounded bass, bright keyboards, and short bursts of distorted guitar carry Matthews’ unhappy drawl toward the sort of pop chorus that can make despair briefly feel sociable. Her insistence that she is okay sounds increasingly like something she needs to practice. Our earlier review followed that idea into the lyric video, where yellow karaoke lettering crosses the blue screen of a CRT television. Created with vintage video equipment by Sean McGuirk and shot by Jesse Korman, it turns failed communication into a singalong with nobody else visibly present. Heard beside Faulty, the song makes the eventual question of solitude feel earned.
Coming Home opens with Matthews in a smoky, Lynchian register, her voice suspended over steadily repeating synths and a breezy dance beat. The low guitar tones bring New Order to mind, with the melodic weight of a Peter Hook bassline translated onto guitar. That combination gives the song an appealing pull between bodily ease and emotional uncertainty. The rhythm leaves the windows open; the vocal suggests someone still deciding whether it is safe to come inside. Here, the album’s broader musical interests allow vulnerability to sound inviting without making it seem simple.
Ice Pick (Walk Away) makes a particularly satisfying turn toward gothic rock. The parenthetical invites a Sisters of Mercy comparison before the guitar has even had its say, and the melody strengthens the association with their First and Last and Always period. A deep post-punk bass groove and the crunchy splash of the drum machine give the track a familiar dry ice chill. Matthews’ tender delivery moderates that severity, placing a vulnerable voice inside an arrangement with its collar firmly turned up. The resemblance is a pleasure to hear, especially from a duo whose love of this music has often been expressed through a different set of instruments.
Pray 4 Me lets the bass loosen its hips. Soft synth pads, a sexy funk groove, and quivering bell tones bring a strain of Bryan Ferry-eque sophisti-pop into the album, expanding its capacity for pleasure as well as distress. There is a suppleness to the arrangement that makes this feel like a natural extension of the record’s emotional dynamic range. Desire, after all, does not become less complicated when somebody gives it a particularly good bassline. Boy Harsher sounds comfortable letting elegance and appetite share the same song.
The album closes with Bleed, setting trip-hop beats against crystalline synths and low, bone-marrow-churning bass. Imagine the Bristol-born genre taking shape inside the electric dreams of the mid-1980s: the drums with a twitching hi-hat and thump have that low, unhurried weight, while the electronics give the space around them a cool, glassy clarity. After the movement of the preceding songs, this slower finish lets the record exhale. Its change of pace offers a place to sit with everything that has happened.
Get Mean gives Matthews and Muller’s affection for post-punk, synthpop, goth, and dance music considerably more room to misbehave. They have grown as people, their lives have changed, and their music has had the good sense to evolve. Those expecting Pain on an endless loop, or Careful with a fresh set of track titles, may find this development inconvenient. For listeners who share Jae and Gus’s musical curiosity, there is pleasure in hearing them loosen up, follow their enthusiasms, and discover what this new chapter of their partnership can become. And if Get Mean isn’t the Boy Harsher you ordered, well, tough shit.
Listen to Get Mean below and order the album here. Additional listening and purchase options are available here.
Since forming in 2014, Matthews and Muller have taken Boy Harsher from the small cassette run of Lesser Man, whose Pain spread widely online, through Yr Body Is Nothing in 2016, the Country Girl EP in 2017, and Careful in 2019. Their background in film became central to 2022’s The Runner, which they wrote, produced, directed, and scored. Their work in cinema also includes The Lonely Woman, their debut feature as directors, starring Chloë Sevigny, FKA twigs, and Sturgill Simpson.
Boy Harsher’s The Heartbreak Tour resumes September 25 at Basilica Hudson, with North American dates running through November 5 at New York’s Knockdown Center. The European and UK run begins November 14 in Lyon and includes London’s Roundhouse on November 29. Choir Boy joins select dates.
Visit the band’s shows page for tickets and current availability.
Boy Harsher live dates — 2026:
- September 25 — Hudson, NY — Basilica Hudson
- September 27 — Boston, MA — Royale
- September 29 — Montreal, QC, Canada — MTELUS
- September 30 — Toronto, ON, Canada — Danforth Music Hall
- October 1 — Detroit, MI — Majestic Theatre
- October 2 — Chicago, IL — Metro — Sold Out
- October 3 — Chicago, IL — Metro — Sold Out
- October 4 — Minneapolis, MN — Varsity Theater
- October 6 — Denver, CO — Summit — Sold Out
- October 9 — Portland, OR — Revolution Hall — Sold Out
- October 10 — Portland, OR — Revolution Hall — Sold Out
- October 11 — Seattle, WA — The Showbox — Sold Out
- October 12 — Seattle, WA — The Showbox
- October 13 — Vancouver, BC, Canada — The Pearl — Sold Out
- October 15 — Oakland, CA — Fox Theater
- October 16 — Los Angeles, CA — Hollywood Palladium — Sold Out
- October 17 — Del Mar, CA — The Sound
- October 18 — Santa Ana, CA — The Observatory Festival Grounds ^ — Sold Out
- October 20 — Las Vegas, NV — House of Blues
- October 21 — Phoenix, AZ — The Van Buren
- October 24 — Fort Worth, TX — Sick New World *
- October 26 — New Orleans, LA — Republic NOLA
- October 27 — Atlanta, GA — Variety Playhouse
- October 28 — Asheville, NC — The Orange Peel
- October 30 — Washington, DC — The Howard Theatre
- October 31 — Philadelphia, PA — Making Time *
- November 5 — New York, NY — Knockdown Center
- November 14 — Lyon, France — Le Transbordeur
- November 15 — Paris, France — Bataclan — Sold Out
- November 16 — Strasbourg, France — La Laiterie
- November 17 — Frankfurt, Germany — Zoom
- November 18 — Lausanne, Switzerland — Docks
- November 19 — Munich, Germany — Kesselhaus
- November 20 — Vienna, Austria — Ottakringer Brauerei
- November 21 — Leipzig, Germany — Felsenkeller
- November 22 — Berlin, Germany — Columbiahalle
- November 24 — Hamburg, Germany — Gruenspan
- November 25 — Cologne, Germany — Essigfabrik — Sold Out
- November 26 — Amsterdam, Netherlands — Paradiso — Sold Out
- November 27 — Lille, France — L’Aéronef
- November 28 — Nantes, France — Warehouse
- November 29 — London, UK — Roundhouse
- December 1 — Manchester, UK — Ritz
- December 2 — Glasgow, UK — SWG3 TV Studio — Sold Out
- December 3 — Bristol, UK — Bristol Electric at SWX — Sold Out
- December 4 — Antwerp, Belgium — De Roma
* Festival date
^ Supporting Turnstile
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Featured photo by Nathaniel Jerome.
