There was a moment when Jae Matthews decided that she wanted to keep Boy Harsher going. It was in Marfa, Texas, where she’d rented out a barn to escape the East Coast winter. (Although, she says, “it was still fucking cold.”) She remembers sitting in said barn and contemplating the future of the band she’d started in 2013 with Augustus Muller, her musical and romantic partner. They’d broken up in 2024, and the project was in limbo.
“I was so back and forth, and the process was so painful; there were many days that I was telling myself, ‘I can’t do this,’” Matthews says. But “my mantra is, ‘We build our own prisons.’ And I realized that I couldn’t do the wishy-washy thing. I was like, ‘Alright, I am committing to moving forward.’”
A lot had happened to upend her life: there was the breakup, her mother had died, she’d started ketamine therapy. So much had changed, and she didn’t want her musical partnership to change, too. “As chaotic as it was, Boy Harsher felt like the only anchor,” Matthews says. “I felt like I had lost everything in my life and couldn’t afford to lose anything else.”
“It’s often fraught, but we can't deny the fact that there is an alchemy between us when it comes to generating music,” she adds. “And that is, I think, incredibly rare.”
So, they pulled through. And it’s a good thing they did. Matthews is speaking to me from a wood-paneled office in Beckett, Massachusetts, an isolated area in the southern Berkshires. Her two dogs are running around at her ankles, one fawning after the other; her sharp features are framed by dark bangs. Muller dials in from a concrete box in Boston with bad wifi. The sun gradually sets as we talk, leaving him in partial shadow. It’s release day for Boy Harsher; Get Mean, their first studio album in seven years — and their first on major label Atlantic Records — is finally out in the world. And people seem to like it. At an album-release party at Oberon in New York, enthusiastic 30-somethings in dark clothing mixed with the likes of The Frost Children and others from Muller’s and Matthews’ creative universe. The album received a 7.0 rating on Pitchfork, and the band’s corresponding tour has sold out in a dozen cities.
The darkwave duo offers something new on songs like “Ronny,” which opens on a sunny layer of ’80s-style synth, and “Jeans” and “Faulty,” bouncier dance tracks that feel optimistic even as they’re shot through with melancholy. Rich chords of live guitar also make their way into the album — the first time in a long time that the band has recorded with the instrument itself, rather than its synthetic counterpart.
Matthews and Muller are still watching the reception to the album play out and trying to absorb the fact that they’ve made something good together — again. “We were wrapping up [the album], and I would drive around the middle of nowhere Massachusetts blasting ‘Faulty.’ I was like, ‘This song fucking rips. It’s such a good song,’” Matthews says. “I have this paranoia that because I love this album, no one else will. We were talking about this a little bit last night and this morning: It’s just really difficult to sit in success and joy. I think that it comes from maybe also believing you don’t deserve it.”
If “deserving” something means going through the ringer and coming out on the other side, Matthews and Muller are more than eligible. They went through periods of not speaking to each other. They were both angry. But “out of all of the stuff going on in our lives — as chaotic as it was — Boy Harsher felt like the only anchor,” Muller reiterates. “It was something that we fully understood and had confidence in. It was like, you wake up, and it’s the thing that makes sense. And we’re going to work on it.”
For both of them, moving forward looked like diving into the process of record-making. The way Muller and Matthews work is as follows: Muller creates a loose instrumental track and sends it over. It’s usually a bass synth, some type of pad, maybe some percussion. Then Matthews tries singing on it, exploring whether her voice gels with that specific combination of sounds. Sometimes the answer is “no, which is tragic; there have been so many pre-demos that I love, and I want so badly to make them work,” she says. But ultimately, there’s no forcing it. “I’m not a trained vocalist,” Matthews explains. “If I was really singing on top [of a track] in a classical way, it would not be a Boy Harsher song.”
As they started to make Get Mean, Matthews and Muller were exchanging tracks and notes at a furious pace. “I was sending her probably three sketches a day,” Muller says. “We were so eager to do this.”
Highsnobiety / Azra Schorr, Highsnobiety / Azra Schorr
When they agree that something is working, Matthews starts to flesh it out. “I plug the track into Ableton and kind of sing gibberish over it,” she says. “These will be really short clips — maybe 15 seconds. The objective is to figure out, do I even fucking sound good? I’ll send those 15 seconds to Gus and he’ll be like, ‘Alright, it sounds good. Can you try to write a melody?’”
“You rarely sing gibberish though,” Muller interjects. “You always have lyrics.”
“Well, it’s gibberish in the sense that it’s non-directed,” Matthews says.
There is a bit of back-and-forth about the gibberish question during which Matthews says, at one point, “Well, as the one doing it…” But ultimately there is consensus that her process is “intuitive.”
Then come the lyrics. Matthews “digs into the vaults” where she keeps notes on experiences, feelings, and moments she can mine to power a song. For this particular album, she dove into the journal she kept in 2024 — that banner of a shitty year. “It’s so fucking dark, and I’m really bad at diaries, so it’s all over the place,” Matthews says. She thinks a lot about the ways in which she desires people, and the ways in which she has felt rejected. She tries not to get too morbid. “My mom had died, and I was like, ‘It would be really hard for me to write a song about her right now.’” For one thing, it was too soon; she hadn’t had enough time to process. For another, “We’re trying to figure out what Boy Harsher is, and I’m like, ‘I don't know if anyone wants to be throwing ass in the club to a song about my mom having dementia and dying. It doesn’t feel right.’”
In fact, Matthews struggled to get words onto paper. She traveled to Mexico, hoping it would cure her writer’s block. She credits Muller with midwifing several songs on the album, including “Tough Luck (When You Don’t Call)” and “Jeans.” The latter song is told from the point of view of “me as a New York City girl moving to Dimes Square and figuring it out,” Muller says. “I always assign each song a character. There’s a lot of role playing.”
After firming up the songs, Muller and Matthews started thinking about production. They were invited to New Braunfels, Texas, to a store called Syntaur, which houses a massive collection of vintage and analog synths. “I touched basically everything,” Muller says. “It was awesome. Our music has always been defined by the limitations of bedroom recording, but now you have unlimited options. It was like, ‘Wow, we can explore all these sounds.’” It was classic kid in a candy store. “Needless to say, we overproduced those demos.”
Listening back at their engineer’s studio in Italy, Muller heard “maximalism in a way that was making me dizzy.” They started stripping things down. That’s when he noticed a guitar sitting in the studio. So many of their songs used guitar samples or sounds, and he set about replacing them with the real thing. “It was refreshing for me to hear an analog instrument,” he says. “The guitar is so rich that it can replace five [other] sounds. And then you can hear everything again.”
Around the same time all this was going on — as if it wasn’t enough to try to heal a relationship and make a record — Matthews and Muller were also working on their first-ever feature film. The Lonely Woman, which is set to release this year, stars Chloë Sevigny and FKA Twigs and was written, directed, and scored by the band. Muller and Matthews have had some scattered experiences with Hollywood, including creating a song for the 2022 film Halloween Ends that came about because director David Gordon Green would, in Matthews’ words, “go cycling every morning and listen to Boy Harsher.” Their indie horror short, The Runner, came out the same year, a COVID-era project that found legs.
After that, they had some momentum; they also started work on The Lonely Woman in 2022. They quickly learned that making a feature-length movie is “the longest, hardest process,” Muller says. “If an album takes two years,” as Get Mean did, “a movie is that 20-fold. We started and stopped one hundred times.”
The experience taught them a lot, Matthews says. “You meet a lot of Hollywood characters who are like, ‘Kid, we’re gonna make a movie.’ When you’re naive like us, you believe them. That did happen several times,” she says. “So then, when it really does get greenlit, you don't believe it. But you should believe it because often that green light is for half the budget you need.”
She starts to describe the premise of The Lonely Woman: how she and Muller were so committed to the characters from The Runner that it is, essentially, a spinoff for one of them. But Muller interrupts her, not wanting to talk about the project — which is currently in post-production — until it’s finished. “I’m superstitious. I can’t. This is completely hypothetical,” he says. “We’re still editing. It might become a comedy, and we might re-shoot and put Paul Giamatti in it.” (Muller has always been like this, including with early Boy Harsher demos. He prefers to let “the work do the talking” — a holdover from when he moved to Austin, Texas, at 18, in 2007, and heard everyone talking big about “starting a screen-printing company” or what have you. Then, the housing market crashed, and everyone’s plans fell apart. Empty bluster.)
Still, there’s a lot of chatter about the film, which has been described, per Deadline, as a “bleak, sensual and atmospheric horror-thriller.” One can imagine an eerie element — a sensibility that’s similar to what has always defined Matthews’ and Muller’s dark electronica. “We love genre films,” Muller says. “We like taking a vessel and putting something in it. It’s like watching an M. Night Shyamalan movie about growing up in a bad household, but he tells it through genre, and it helps you understand.”
The movie doesn’t yet have a release date; Muller and Matthews will be editing and submitting it through the fall. They’re also touring — first the U.S., then internationally — through December. And somehow, they’d also like to find time to get back in the studio. “We know what we want to do. There’s just not enough time in the day to do it all,” Muller says. “But we’re going to try.”