Boy Harsher returns with “Jeans,” their first new original song under the Boy Harsher banner since the cinematic 2022 stretch that brought The Runner and “Burn It Down” from the Halloween Ends soundtrack into their dance-noir universe. Arriving after the announcement of The Heartbreak Tour, the new track feels less like a simple comeback than a bold re-entry: a stonewashed post-punk fever dream about escape, ambition, image, and the uneasy moment when the fantasy of freedom gets refitted into a commodity.
Musically, “Jeans” may be Boy Harsher’s most openly post-punk-sounding track yet. More guitar-forward than anything in their catalog, and with a bubbling synth beat, it finds Gus Muller riding a bouncy guitar riff that sounds as if it were pilfered from his foray into Safe Mind. It is a bold breath of fresh air for the duo, cutting through their usual synth-driven machinery with a wiry melodic lift. Threaded beneath it is a steel-slide guitar, giving the song the perfect western cowboy twang to match the line-dancing imagery in the video.
The juxtaposition works because Jae Matthews knows exactly how to occupy the space around it. Her vocal here is sultry, cool, and lightly scuffed at the edges, less an incantation from a dark room than a sideways glance from the passenger seat. Against the guitar’s buoyant post-punk snap, “Jeans” takes on an almost Pretenders-like shape: sleek, restless, and deceptively direct, with noir atmosphere refracted through something closer to a new wave song’s 80s pop pulse.
In a statement accompanying the release, Matthews says:
“‘Jeans’ came from two distinct experiences between Gus and I.
I was living in a ‘small town,’ trying to understand my life and attempting to find freedom from the pressure of being ‘anyone.’ Meanwhile, Gus was chasing his aspirations in the Big Apple. We were both seeking our dreams in polar ways … and in this cheeky way, ‘Jeans’ speaks on that quest through our commodification of a dream.”
The band also described the video’s concept on Instagram:
“We wanted to make our own Robert Palmer, “Addicted to Love.” We wanted to line dance in latex. Hot hands and cattle prods. We wanted to try to encapsulate that small-town feeling in an inaccessible apple.”
Filmed by Owen Smith-Clark and edited by Chris Campion, the Boy Harsher-directed video places a pink-haired The 7th Girl, Ella, in a large, mostly empty room with fluorescent lights, tall windows, and pale walls. A group of dancers in black latex enters and performs line-dance choreography around her. Matthews sings in the room while Muller plays guitar, and both appear on old television monitors throughout the clip.
The video cuts between close-ups of boots, gloves, latex, denim, faces, and the dancers’ formations. Some shots show the performers carrying cattle-prod-like props; others focus on the pink-haired woman as she watches the group, moves with them, and appears against a warm, western-colored backdrop. The clip keeps returning to the monitors, where close-ups of eyes and performance footage flicker inside the frame.
A small town can feel like a sealed room; yet ambition can feel like another kind of enclosure. Freedom looks different from far away, especially when someone has already figured out how to turn longing into a look. Whether “Jeans” is the first flare from a larger body of work or simply the opening signal of Boy Harsher’s next phase, it arrives with the uneasy precision of a transmission from somewhere familiar and wonderfully strange.
Watch the video for “Jeans” below:
“Jeans” lands as Boy Harsher prepares for The Heartbreak Tour, their first extensive North American headlining run since the 2022 tour cycle around The Runner, when select dates paired the live show with screenings of the duo’s short horror film. They have continued to surface through select shows, festival appearances, remix work, soundtrack projects, and adjacent solo endeavors, but the center of gravity has shifted away from the usual album-tour pattern and toward film, scoring, and world-building.
Matthews and Muller, who met in Savannah while studying film, first released Lesser Man as a small-run cassette before the EP became an underground hit. They followed with Yr Body Is Nothing in 2016 and Careful in 2019, sharpening their cold, body-moving electronics into something increasingly cinematic. That impulse became explicit with The Runner, the duo’s 2022 short horror film and accompanying soundtrack, written, produced, and directed by Matthews and Muller. The project blurred album, score, and visual world-building, pairing the duo’s darker instrumentals with guest turns from Mariana Saldaña of BOAN on “Machina” and Cooper B. Handy, aka Lucy, on “Autonomy.”
The Machina thread continued in 2024 with the Machina EP, which expanded the track with alternate versions and remixes. Boy Harsher also kept a steady presence through remix work, including their 2024 rework of Pet Shop Boys’ “New London Boy,” a pairing that made sense: two duos fascinated by desire, distance, pop architecture, and the strange glamour of the city after dark.
Matthews, meanwhile, has been building a parallel life in film and solo-adjacent work. She wrote My Animal, the Jacqueline Castel-directed horror romance starring Bobbi Salvör Menuez and Amandla Stenberg, which premiered at the 2023 Sundance Film Festival. This year, she stepped out under her own name with a cover of Buzz Kull’s “Man On The Beat,” released digitally March 20 and issued as a limited 12-inch through Heartworm Press on April 17. The physical edition, released as Heartworm #140 in an edition of 500, pairs Matthews’ version with a Spike Hellis remix on the B-side.
Muller has continued to deepen his own work as a composer and producer. His score for My Animal, released by Sacred Bones, marked his debut feature film score and was written and recorded at his home studio in Northampton using hardware and analog synthesizers. He has also pursued Safe Mind, his collaborative project with Cooper B. Handy. The duo’s debut album, Cutting the Stone, arrived in 2025 through Nude Club, extending the chemistry first heard when Handy appeared on Boy Harsher’s The Runner soundtrack.
The biggest new chapter, however, is The Lonely Woman, Boy Harsher’s first feature film as directors. Written and directed by Matthews and Muller, the rural New England horror-thriller stars Chloë Sevigny, FKA twigs, Sturgill Simpson, Will Oldham, and Jake Weary, with Boy Harsher also providing the score.
The Heartbreak Tour began with a June 26 appearance at 1015 Folsom in San Francisco before properly kicking into gear Sept. 25 at Basilica Hudson in Hudson, New York. From there, Boy Harsher will move through Boston, Montreal, Toronto, Detroit, Chicago, Minneapolis, Denver, Portland, Seattle, Vancouver, Oakland, Los Angeles, Del Mar, Las Vegas, Phoenix, Fort Worth, New Orleans, Atlanta, Asheville, Washington, D.C., Philadelphia, and Queens, where the tour wraps Nov. 5 at Knockdown Center.
The routing includes two-night stands at Chicago’s Metro, Portland’s Revolution Hall, and Seattle’s The Showbox, along with an Oct. 24 appearance at Sick New World – DFW in Fort Worth. Support on select dates includes Choir Boy, Evanora Unlimited, True Blue, and Kassie Krut.
The centerpiece of the fall trek lands on Halloween night, when Boy Harsher headline Making Time Pure Halloween at Franklin Music Hall in Philadelphia. The Oct. 31 All Hallows’ Eve event also features Model/Actriz live, Conducta, Marie Davidson on DJ duty, Kassie Krut live, and Dave P., plus a futuristic visual experience from Klip Collective.
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