Boy Harsher Featured On Soundtrack To Halloween Ends
With “Burn It Down” the duo adds a sense of visceral underground cool to the latest chapter of the iconic film series.
The Halloween franchise was instrumental in catapulting the slasher genre and it’s Hitchcock-based inspiration to the forefront of Hollywood. Over 13 installments later, dark wave duo Boy Harsher add a sense of visceral underground cool to the latest movie, catalysing the hype surrounding the eighties revival in both cinema and music. For their hotly anticipated single ”Burn it Down”, Boy Harsher’s label Nude Club Records has teamed up with Sacred Bones Records. It was in a movie worthy twist of events that Augustus Muller and Jae Matthews even stepped up in the first place. In a press release the band states:
“During an extremely brief period of rest between tours, we got this call from the music supervisor of Halloween Ends. The director, David Gordon Green, had listened to our music and wanted to use something for the final installment in the trilogy—Halloween Ends. We flew to New York the next day to meet the team and discuss the possibilities. It was totally surreal. Obviously we’re huge fans of Carpenter and the franchise is a fav, but to work with Gordon Green was also so special, his early films (George Washington, Undertow, Snow Angels) were heavy influences on our work. The real kicker is that Halloween Ends was shot in Savannah, GA—the birthplace of Boy Harsher and where we met. Unbelievable. It all felt too synchronous, and we knew we had to make something work although we were about to leave for a multi-month tour that week. We flew home to Massachusetts, dug through old demos, and found ‘Burn It Down.’ In the end it was the perfect energy for the bittersweet love affair between Allyson and Corey, so during a couple days off—we cleaned it up and made it come alive.”
Boy Harsher’s musical history has underground credit which makes ”Burn It Down” and the final installment of the franchise command attention. An interest in film came alongside their name change from Teen Dreemz back in their college days. Their devil-may-care attitude to the music business also gives them the guts to convincingly ride the wave of renewed interest in a cinema icon like Michael Myers. In fact, Nude Club Records was set up solely to release their own work and that of related acts. Bold stunts like recording the soundtrack to two adult movies helped them prove they were an anything-goes artistic coupling with the creative weight to do justice to a hotly anticipated film. As a result, they already had a striking position when they were approached.
The band’s official site calls the inclusion of the track ‘the most wild news’. With additional compositions by Carpenter’s son Cody and Daniel Davies, most of the music for Halloween Ends was recorded in either Carpenter’s or Davies’ Studio. The soundtrack also features licensed tracks such as “Toccata and Fugue in D Minor” by Johann Sebastian Bach as well as classic rock and punk by the Dead Kennedys and Blue Oyster Cult. The Halloween Ends placement has led to the Burn It Down EP, which will be released on 12” vinyl in January 2023 with four different versions of the track that can be pre-ordered here.
Boy Harsher (US)
Featured Image by Samantha Casolari
