The Needle Drop's Jasper Willems met with Safe Mind – the project of Augustus Muller (Boy Harsher) and Cooper B. Handy (LUCY, Taxidermists, Club Casualties) – ahead of their show at The Hague's Grauzone festival. The chat sprawled between the lasting appeal of New Jack Swing, the odd pull of Massachusetts and sad theatres in dead malls, among other things.

Every so often, Cooper B. Handy posts a picture of an empty parking lot with ‘SCENE REPORT’ typed in all-caps, and it makes me laugh every time. Admittedly, there’s a bit of fun to be had with the strange dichotomies that embody Handy’s home ground of Massachusetts. It’s an area where seasons shine a different light on the scenery like the slow flicker of a sign post. In the warmer months, Cape Cod becomes a tourist haven, and in the colder months, it becomes a ghost town where one has to basically learn to “hang out with yourself,” as Handy puts it.

The artist known as LUCY, who also splits his time with punk outfit Taxidermists and oddball pop project Club Casualties, has embodied this freewheeling spirit like the purest of nectar. The drudgery of daily life actually became foundational for shoestring pop brimmed with winsome hooks, appealing melodies and scrappy sincerity. Handy’s YouTube channel, a collection of grainy VHS videos of his enchanting jams, almost acts as an alternative travelogue of coastal regions surrounding Route 9. 

“Well, I grew up in Cape Cod, which is different,” Handy says. “Western Massachusetts is like the opposite during the year, when there’s all the students and everything. That’s where all the industries are happening. But where I grew up, everything was happening during the summertime. And during the rest of the year, it was empty.”

Meanwhile Augustus Muller, one half of darkwave/EBM titans Boy Harsher, grew up more in the New England mainland, within the small congregations embedded in the Berkshire mountains. This place doesn’t quite have the coastal sheen of Handy’s pastures; it's foggy, there’s a lot of dense forests and crooked roads snaking in between its chiseled bedrock. There’s tales of dead zones, deserted malls, and witch hunts, which indeed makes this place quite easy to get lost in. 

Muller now lives in an apartment in New York, for he is currently working with Boy Harsher co-founder Jae Matthews on a laborious movie project called The Lonely Woman, which features high profile names like Will Oldham, FKA twigs and Chloe Sevigny. Despite having a whole world to survey amidst Boy Harsher’s rise as a household name,  the film’s backdrop remains wholly transfixed on Muller’s Western Mass stomping grounds, just like its predecessor The Runner (which features Handy easily getting away with playing ‘the teenager’).  

“Film is always a different medium,” Muller says of the project, tight-lipped on any of the juicy deets. “It’s pretty literal. You’re showing images of stuff, and you show the things you are most familiar with. The Western Mass countryside is something I feel I own and I can talk about. So it naturally becomes more sincere, because it’s something I’m familiar with. In many ways, I feel I’ve been exploring the same ideas and the same sounds and the same images for my entire adult life, and I still haven’t figured out how. I still haven’t done it right. I’m happy still exploring the same stuff over and over again.”

On the question of whether Muller will linger in the thrill of the chase, or whether he yearns for some kind of arrival in understanding, he pauses for a moment, staring vacantly at a city square where the three of us are huddled together on a bench. His answer rings both resolute and sincere: “Absolutely not. I want to get it. I wish I could get it and move on to the next thing.”

Tonight we’re not in New England, but in The Hague, where the annual Grauzone festival descends. Its annual lineup puts a deeper focus on subcultures well-acquainted with doom and darkness: industrial, EBM, post-punk, darkwave and everything in between. With Boy Harsher, Muller has been a fish in water as a recurring guest of the festival. But as one half of Safe Mind – the pop project he co-founded with Handy – the music is a bit of an outlier from the pack of well, goth-abutting live acts. “I’m a little nervous whether we’re not going to stick out too much,” Handy remarks. Muller: “I think 'Hold on to That' will be a good test.”

Playing a New Jack Swing-type beat inside of a church at a Dutch goth festival is, by all means a first: a memory worth holding onto regardless of how it will go down. “When I heard that beat from Gus, it felt like no one was really doing that stuff now," Handy explains. "So it seems like a good time to do it. Part of me is like we should almost do a whole album like that… maybe with some more nuance.”

“The first five or so Safe Mind songs were sort of like a hodgepodge of beats I had made, which I sent to Cooper to see what he responded to,” Muller adds. “With 'Hold on to That', I didn’t think anyone would be able to sing on this. And Cooper was like: ‘I got this!’”

Gus reveals Handy and him obsessively listened to Janet Jackson’s Rhythm Nation during their drives between shows, saying “The production of that is a big inspiration. We got that pan flute sample.” Handy: “On our way to New York, I think that’s all we listened to.”

Upon arriving at Grauzone, Handy posted some scenes of the Lutheran Church where Safe Mind is set to play, capping an Instagram story with an exuberant ‘Mozart Played Here!’. I suppose there are acts more blasphemous than following the footsteps of Mozart and Janet Jackson into a holy room. 

Safe Mind came out of a similar strange spell of illumination: the previous collaboration between Boy Harsher and Handy on the former’s cult hit “Autonomy”, a miraculous juxtaposition where Handy’s lo-fi joie de vivre plays on equal footing with Boy Harsher’s frigid geometrics. The music video brought the odd spark of levity amidst the pandemic imposed disorder that inspired The Runner – both the film project and the music as its connective tissue. We see Handy showing off goofy dance moves in bright cornfields and hitching rides in the back of trucks, but also spooky jitter-cam footage of some foggy Berkshire backroads.

It is capped by a glorious dance routine injected by a manifold of gloomy misfits. ”Autonomy” feels like the whole of Massachusetts crammed into 4 minutes and 51 seconds. Inside the cracks forming, Safe Mind blossomed from the seed of the infectious Bert and Ernie-dynamic between Muller and Handy. They are in many ways polar opposites: Handy’s brilliant nose for hooks and melodies seems to arrive almost by offbeat happenstance, while Muller likens himself to a neurotic stickler, planting novel sounds into the existing grid with proficient command. 

Safe Mind is in some aspects a safe space for both these souls to indulge in scratching very particular itches; and maybe more importantly, to explore their mutual creativity within fresh contexts as well. Their distinct sensibilities coalesced wonderfully on last year’s debut LP Cutting the Stone: a mutant strand of pop nostalgia blossomed out of the static-laden Western Mass soil. It’s perfectly expressed on the cover artwork by a misshapen baseball glove that doesn’t look like it can’t really catch anything, yet still looks well-worn and used. 

It’s a somewhat gauche, guileless image, which tracks well with Safe Mind's noise kid take on 80s pop tropes; tunes like lead single “6’ Pole” and “Born To Love” play out like thrifty dorm room renditions of Depeche Mode or New Order. Handy jokingly reveals that it wasn’t even him playing the new wave-like guitar solo of the former song, but frequent Boy Harsher collaborator Jordan Romero. “All of my close friends are now like 'That’s not you, is it?'” he wryly smirks. “I’m not sure if it’s okay to share that.” 

Muller: “I think if you’re writing an album, you choose what’s right for the thing.” 

Handy: “The part Jordan played: I play it every night that we play ‘6’ Pole’. But I don’t play it quite the way it sounds on the record.”

This illustrates the fun push-and-pull between Muller and Handy’s songwriting, with each track on Cutting the Stone finding that sweet spot between the spontaneous and studious. The duo’s biggest common denominator –  as dwellers of New England’s ever fertile noise scene – almost acting like a stabilizer amidst their creative folly. Muller first saw Handy perform as LUCY at a basement show in a grassroots venue called Tube Cats, sharing the bill with Show Me The Body and Boy Harsher.

Handy: “It was a fun show. But it was a show where Boy Harsher became too big to be doing that. I think Jae was like ‘We're not gonna do this again’ but we’re going to do this one'.

Muller: “...with Show Me The Body.”

Handy: “It was Boy Harsher and me and Show Me The Body.”

Muller: “Not the final basement show I played, but one of the last basement shows I played.”

Handy: “It was crazy though, it was overloaded with people. Way too many people. Someone told me there were three hundred people at that show.”

Muller: “It was like in a four bedroom house. That’s what’s cool about Western Mass, it’s a small town, but there’s all these freaky people. A really cool DIY-scene, a noise scene. When I moved back to Western Mass and started playing music, there were cool house parties. This was an exceptional night.”

So three hundred people can be jam packed in a house at Western Mass, and at the same time, entire malls can be completely abandoned, offering eerie glimpses of what the future may hold. "They wanna talk about the bedroom / I wanna talk about the brick store," Handy croons on “Brick Store”, a line that got me down the Dead Mall Reddit rabbit hole, watching testimonials of urban explorers visiting them. 

“We have one mall there that’s always on the verge of being dead, I think there’s like some real dead malls out there,” Handy reacts. Muller adds, “There used to be across the Hadley Mall, where the Walmart is, that used to be called the dead malls. Then they renovated it and turned it into a Whole Foods.”

Handy: “You mean where the Target is?”

Muller: “There was like an identical mall in it that had a movie theater in it that was weird and sad; but looking back on it, that was awesome. It was like a bad mall and a dead mall. So we had both of those.”

Muller’s offhand remark about fondly reminiscing about that lone forlorn movie theatre in a dying mall at a time where he can see all the movies he wants a stone’s throw away in New York – it strikes as oddly poignant. There’s a stirring defiance in both Muller and Handy still restlessly chasing ghosts in the dark with TASCAMs and 808s, working around their sometimes frustrating limitations in an era where computer software can make producers dream up any idea in a jiffy. 

Handy: “Maybe the first four years I was doing solo stuff, I was only using a tape machine. I would make my instrumentals and manipulate them on the TASCAM. Then it came to a point where I was playing in a bigger room, and there was just so much hiss building up. And people started asking at some point: why are you doing it this way?”

Muller: “Was it the one with the four faders or the two faders?”

Handy: “Four. I’d bring different things at different points. But I wasn’t that good at using them. But it made for these crazy sets. Some people liked what I did, other people said, you gotta have less hiss going on. “

Muller: “Remember there was like the Dolby Hiss reduction system?”

Handy nods. “But sometimes that takes away everything from the beat.”

I ask Handy about his ongoing ambivalence of listeners seeing his music as a joke when, oftentimes, his lyrics try to express something wholesome and sincere. Within the backdrop of his own flimsy GarageBand beats, the unintended comedic effect often reigns free. “That’s what I love about Cooper's music,” Muller says, spoken like a fan. “There's a sincerity and an innocence to it.” 

However, in Safe Mind, Muller’s EBM/darkwave-adjacent beatmaking opens a different expressway for Handy’s wordplay: still compulsive wholesome and funny, but there’s a palpable beauty, desperation and melancholy in tracks like “Standing On Air” and “What’s Left”. Especially under the shadow of recent revelations about the unabated evils lurking behind the curtains pulling strings, the odd contrasts in the songs performed by the duo at Lutheran Church dovetailed into something genuinely moving. 

So here I was thinking Safe Mind at Grauzone would ward off some of the consummate dread channeled by some of their peers playing tonight; yet the dread became all the more visible through the prism of the artless abandon of these songs. There was dancing and weeping, and simmering beneath, a growing urgency to indeed protect what is left. This church became what it meant to represent: a place of true sanctuary for all lost souls attending. Handy unfurls the ever-present ache behind his open-hearted naiveté, as Muller breaks from his self-imposed feedback loop; noise and fracture offering clear retreat at every turn. 

The show was already powerful without closing it with the Boy Harsher song that kickstarted Safe Mind’s maddening alliance. Once the synth melody of “Autonomy” resonated between the church's brass gates you could see the angels above the stage for real, marching in a straight line. 

Cutting the Stone is out now. Order the record here.