Event

Boy Harsher at Crucible

Tickets $14 presale / $16 day of show
Doors at 8

Boy Harsher return with their second LP Careful-a wild ride that celebrates abandon, while mourning attachment + love.

Boy Harsher began as an urgent need to produce and consume. In the winter of 2014, Jae Matthews and Augustus Muller started to experiment with sound, video, and text. The advent of Boy Harsher! Born out of this tumultuous relationship in swampy Georgia, their first EP Lesser Manis sexy as it is sulking. Lesser Mandetermined their morose, pop sound. In their second album, the full length Yr Body is Nothing, Matthews and Muller took that dark and ran with it. Both releases reflect the fervor present in their adolescent lust and anger. Yet, before Matthews and Muller recorded any song, their chaos made the project vulnerable and invariably lead to momentary destruction . In what was at the time believed to be their last performance, Matthews had careful tattooed across her back, while Muller fried the speakers. A lit candle was thrown. They were not on speaking terms.

At that time Careful was meant as a warning: the cautionary understanding of love. The duo felt as though they were disappearing within one another. But, if Boy Harshers first two releases narrated the pain and desperation that follows after something goes awry, then this LP, Careful, describes what loves gives you: fear and joy, tenderness and pain. For Boy Harsher, Careful attempts to detail the enveloping trauma of loss combined with the fantasy of escape (a reckless abandon).

Matthews and Muller certainly made amends since that fateful live tattooing, loud as hell performance, however both still have complex relationships to attachments. In 2017 Matthews mother was diagnosed with dementia and as the symptoms began to take hold the essence of careful became relevant in a new way. Matthews relationship with her parents has always been complicated: her father past away when she was a teenager and her mother is an alcoholic, consistently unpredictable with affection and stability. The loss of her father was extreme, yet acute, whereas the persistent sadness of losing her mother (the memories that defined their relationship) is a slow, chronic suffering. The trauma of losing someone is almost in tandem to Matthews understanding of love. It with these intensely personal struggles Matthews and Muller began developing their new album. With Careful, Boy Harsher use the medium of minimal electronics to create a compelling narrative of a deteriorating family and the reaction to run away from it.

Careful splits its time between songs that study the trauma embedded within loss and the compulsion to flee. The track The Look You Gave (Jerry) is named after Matthews deceased step-father, who passed right before her mother was diagnosed with dementia. The song mourns Jerry, as described through her mothers perspective: I close my eyes and I can almost see: The look u gave / when u / you ran from me. For Matthews the fiercest pain in relation to her mothers disease is her mothers loss of comfort, a grasping at an image that slowly fades away. Death for Matthews and her mother has become synonymous with abandonment. Not unlike the pain of losing her father, Matthews conceives the hollowness where intimacy once was -the melancholy of disappearance.

The message of careful also plays out as universal warning in these Boy Harshers tracks do not be fooled, loss is inevitable. Fate describes the willing lover who knows that there is nothing their love can do to keep their partner. Hi Hi / Oh No / In spite of me / you always go. Forget the crying / tempt the pain / hi hi / gone again. In Careful affection vanishes as quickly as it arrives. To understand love, you must accept that it dissolves, leaving sorrow and disappointment in its wake. Yet, Careful reconciles the deterioration of love with the gilded expectation of escapism.

Careful marks Boy Harshers most dynamic album to date. The band expands upon the fine-tuned production developed in their last EP Country Girl, but with plenty of nods to the fast tempo and grittiness of Lesser Man. Matthews and Muller attribute the evolution of their sound to the extensive touring they completed in the last few years. Traveling and connecting with people has been so fundamental; Muller says were really able to experiment with our material and it feels like the live set as grown into an entity of its own. Boy Harsher embarked on two US and two EU tours this past year, where audiences recognize their set as faster, harder version of their recorded material. Careful was primarily written at home in Massachusetts, with just a handful of synthesizers and a laptop. For Muller a minimal set up is paramount to his process. Boy Harsher mixed the album in Italy with Maurizio Baggio of La Distilleria Studio who had a big hand in finalizing the sound.

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Crucible (View)
3116 Commercial Ave.
Madison, WI 53714
United States

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Owner: Crucible

On BPT Since: Mar 18, 2019

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