- More immaculate synth pop from the American group, with a new hint of horror.
- In a time when new artists break through on TikTok regularly, it's no strange thing for a band to be born—or reborn—through the algorithm. This process started around 2014 for Boy Harsher, when the Massachusetts duo of Jay Matthews and Augustus Muller dropped "Pain," a single that racked up hundreds of thousands of views on YouTube, making them something of an overnight success. Ever since, Boy Harsher have been refining a gothy strain of synth pop that has won them growing legions of enthusiastic fans, and tours all over the United States and Europe.
Drawing inspiration from Matthews' headspace after being diagnosed with multiple sclerosis in 2020 and recorded during pandemic uncertainty, their latest project—and fifth studio record—The Runner is both an album and a short film, depicting a horror story the band have described as "an exorcism." There are echoes of Throbbing Gristle on the noisy, meandering "Tower" or The Chromatics on the neon-tinged electro of "Give Me A Reason." Just when the duo seems like they might fall into nostalgic '80s pastiche, they hold strong with Matthews' terse vocals, which anchor the band's distinct brand of electroclash-adjacent synth pop.
Songs like "Give Me A Reason" represent some of the group's biggest and catchiest yet. You can practically hear a crowd whooping along to the opening bars of "Autonomy" where slightly twee vocals—"Feeling new / Seeming used / Birthday suit / When They shoot / Autonomy"—skip over twinkling keys and a Peter Hook-style bassline that makes it sound a tad like New Order, in the transformative period right after the curtains closed on Joy Division. Slow chord stabs and a wild combination of Spanish spoken-word lyrics and golden age Italo vocoder licks make for another potential hit on "Machina."
Because this is somewhere between an album and a soundtrack, there are the requisite ambient interludes—like the sounds you hear before a violent horror scene—that interrupt the flow of the usual Boy Harsher bangers. And they feel usual: in between their extensive musical highs and lower than personal lows, there's a growing sense that Boy Harsher have mastered a formula, which is exactly why they've become so successful.
There's a fine line drawn between pastiche and surefire songwriting, and the group straddle it deftly. They've had moonshot crossover hits ("Pain") and underground anthems ("Face The Fire"), all of which feel like they could easily be from over a decade years ago, but also very now, thanks to the theatricality the group bring to everything they do. The Runner is perfectly at home on stage or screen—you decide which pill to swallow.
Tracklist01. Tower
02. Give Me a Reason
03. Autonomy feat. Lucy - Cooper B. Handy
04. The Ride Home
05. Escape
06. Machina feat. Ms. BOAN - Mariana Saldaña
07. Untitled (Piano)
08. I Understand