Boy Harsher

The Runner is the score to the short horror film of the same name, written, produced and directed by Boy Harsher, the duo of Jae Matthews and Augustus Muller. Released in January 2022 together with the film, it is less a band album than a soundtrack in the proper sense: music written around a character and a place, a woman running through the woods, and built to carry images of lust, compulsion and dread.

The pieces began as sketches in the months when the duo could neither tour nor imagine making club music, and Matthews was recovering from an MS diagnosis. Muller worked on moody, cinematic material with no clear destination other than catharsis; the film grew out of those sketches, and the sketches became its score.

The record alternates eerie instrumentals, drones and a short piano piece with a handful of songs, so that the dark pop Boy Harsher are known for appears in fragments, like music heard inside the film. Two of those songs are given to guest singers and sound like different bands altogether: Machina is a HI-NRG homage performed by Mariana Saldaña of BOAN, Autonomy a new wave anthem with Cooper B. Handy (Lucy).

Written and recorded at home in Florence, Massachusetts, produced with Jordan Romero, mixed and mastered by Maurizio Baggio at La Distilleria in Bassano del Grappa. LP on black vinyl, Nude Club Records.