The Dare: “The attitude of the early 2000s that we lost, that people want back; it’s more rock and roll”

Everyone’s got something to say about THE DARE.

Words: Abigail Firth.
Photos: Jennifer McCord.

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When asked what is wrong with New York, The Dare answers: “Nothing.” Really? “No.”

In the few months since we last spoke, things have changed quite a bit for Harrison Patrick Smith, once a New York micro-celeb, now reaching the dizzying heights of, erm, the PopCrave X (formerly Twitter) feed.

‘Guess’, the Charli xcx ‘BRAT’ bonus track that Harrison produced, and its subsequent Billie Eilish remix, took a raunchy sledgehammer to the top of the UK chart with its name-dropping pre-chorus lyric, making any casual Radio 1 listener go, “Who’s The Dare?” The rest of the world wasn’t far behind, and before long, his debut single ‘Girls’ was having its TikTok moment and making its way up the Spotify viral charts.

Like kismet, it’s all kicked off just in time for The Dare’s debut album rollout. ‘What’s Wrong With New York?’ was revealed with the similarly cocky ‘Perfume’ in May and later the hedonistic ‘You’re Invited’.

“It’s been a bit crazy,” he says. “Super exciting that people are finding out about me and enjoying the music. It’s all happening at once, which is fun.”

Fun is practically all Harrison has been having lately. Between doing his own tour around Europe and carrying on his club night Freakquencies, then popping up at various events beside Charli xcx (DJing at her Boiler Room Ibiza set) and her other half George Daniel (at his dh2 label launch rave), his nocturnal lifestyle makes itself known today when we ambush him with an interview at 10am New York time, which he crawls out of bed to do.

But it’s this lifestyle that’s almost wholly inspired ‘What’s Wrong With New York?’, a record that loosely follows a guy on a night out, going through the motions and working his way through various clubs, drinks, and more. It’s similar in its structure to (the original ‘BRAT’ For Men) ‘A Grand Don’t Come For Free’ by The Streets, although Harrison says it was never intended to be quite the concept album.

 “It can’t all be fun, or else it’s not really real or interesting”

“It actually reminds me of a night I had in college with my roommates, where it started off like the four of us going out, and we were all super, super excited and just drinking a bunch, going from bar to bar, and then it ended with one of them completely naked and crying. I thought about that a little bit, and you know it can’t all be fun, or else it’s not really real or interesting or accurate to my life.”

The most perfect post-pandemic album opener, the lyric “It’s just rock and roll, you won’t die, you can’t spend your whole life inside” is resonant enough to kick the arses of the tectonic plates into gear. ‘Open Up’ is maniacally suicidal at times (please don’t go grabbing the third rail) and wickedly convincing for the rest. It sets the scene for a record that twists your arm into another night out when you haven’t quite gotten over the last one yet, even if it is likely to end in disaster.

“The first half is much more, no pun intended, invitational and debaucherous and fun and kind of straightforward, and then the second half is more of the hangover or the end of the night, where you get a little too drunk and freak out or cry or something.”

Harrison moved to New York in 2018, originally because his girlfriend at the time gave him the ultimatum of moving to the city with her or breaking up (spoiler: they split up later anyway), but his family’s roots in the city had sparked an interest in the East Coast long before. That, coupled with the fact that his hometown on the other side of the States was never doing much for him, left him with very itchy feet after uni.

“My family is from New York, historically, and so I grew up knowing I had a lot of family in the city and upstate. My dad’s from Long Island. I was always intrigued by it, and growing up in the suburbs of Seattle, I was always like, this is the opposite of New York, and I didn’t really feel like I belonged there. Even watching TV shows and reading magazines about New York, I remember watching even 30 Rock or something, which is so silly, but I got the sense from the show that there was this sort of energy in New York that was totally foreign to me.”

It was always going to be New York. It’s evident in the fact that his imagery looks like old American Apparel ads and not Abercrombie & Fitch ones, but Los Angeles and Hollywood were never on the cards – just not as gritty and never exciting to Harrison. Plus, it’s hard to wear a full suit in the California heat, and as he’d recently discovered, the blazer came way before The Dare.

“I’ve been here for a while now, and it definitely feels like home. But coming and going a lot has changed my whole feeling on it. I sort of can’t believe I stayed here for so long without leaving before because it can be so much and really intense. But also, the landscape of New York has changed for me a lot in the last year or two as far as where I go, where I’m spending time, and where I live.”

Of course, Harrison has gone from being a guy who DJs a good club night (and still does) to being heralded as the leader of a city-wide party revival and, in less than a year, becoming one of the most hyped musician-slash-producers in the world. New York has a lot to say about The Dare, but he has a lot to say about the city that made him too.

“The whole point was that it would be like a double entendre, where it’s like if you say ‘what’s wrong with New York?’ it’s like what’s wrong with going to this bar or something, but at the same time, you can say everything is wrong with it. I just wanted to point to the liveliness of the discourse around New York and the art scene right now, and the intensity of living here, and also the wrong feelings and right feelings about being a New Yorker.”

“From the jump, I wanted to make electroclash”

In the past couple of years, the New York art scene has been reborn – perhaps not in a way that’s as globally dominating as it was 20 years ago, but for the first time in ages, it feels like backs have been turned on LA’s glossy sheen, necks craning towards the Big Apple’s seedy glamour instead. Before Spotify had an official Indie Sleaze playlist (what came first, the genre or the playlist?), eyes were on New York’s new musical darlings and their DIY ethos.

Although Harrison often finds himself accused of being an LCD Soundsystem tribute act, ‘Meet Me in the Bathroom’-era bands have always been a prominent part of The Dare’s mood board for a host of reasons.

“From the jump, I wanted to make electroclash,” says Harrison. “A couple of years ago, it didn’t feel like anybody was doing it, so when I made ‘Girls’, I think that was why it all felt fresh to people. I just feel a kinship to that era spiritually, like, in my life. I also feel like nightlife in New York and even in London – there’s a shared nostalgia for that era. Not just cosplaying it, but wanting something real. The attitude of the early 2000s that we lost over the next five or ten years, that people want back, where it’s a little bit more raw, it’s more rock and roll, it’s a little dirty and sloppier. It’s not perfect; the production on the album isn’t perfectly clean all the time. There’s just a lot that I love about the aesthetics and the music of that time. So that was kind of the goal, to keep one eye on that and one eye on modern times.”

Obvious touchpoints on ‘What’s Wrong With New York?’ are those early 2000s NY bands, not just LCD Soundsystem but The Strokes, The Rapture, and Interpol, pushed up against instrumentals that recall The Knife and Soulwax. The storytelling, on the other hand, feels much more British, echoing songwriters like Alex Turner, Mike Skinner, and Jarvis Cocker, who blend everyday observations with tales that may or may not be true.

“I’ve always liked music that’s funny and has a lot of attitude and people who are not afraid to explore emotions beyond sadness or melancholy or whatever. I find that to be the default for a lot of musicians, and I’ve always been excited by – like, it’s not even that they’re more complicated emotions because sadness is probably one of the most complicated – but the reason I go to music is not just to cry or have my feelings validated. It’s for a plethora of reasons. So I try to make music that’s joyful and funny and aggressive and theatrical at times, and really untheatrical and raw at other times.”

And it’s not just the music of a bygone era that The Dare calls back to; he’s also a big fan of the attitude rock stars of the 90s and 2000s had, both on stage and off. There’s a nod to Matty Healy’s gobshite tendencies and Lana Del Rey’s timekeeping nonchalance as modern rock star behaviours, but it’s not quite the same. Different aspects of his own character are revealed at different points; he’s flamboyant and arrogant on stage, dryly witty on TikTok, reserved and laidback in interviews – it’s more than just the music that feels a bit retro.

“It is hard. It’s harder to be wacky. I feel like it’s maybe just because you’re looking at the response all the time with something like Twitter. And it’s weird because it’s young people too [being] like, ‘How dare they be rude to this reporter!’ They don’t want the rock stars to be like rock stars; they want them to be polite and well-behaved citizens, which is not what I want either.” (Ironically, The Dare has been very polite and very punctual both times we’ve sat down with him.) “I want them to be like Liam Gallagher. I think that there’s something about being a rock star too that is kind of missing from culture in that classic way.”

“I’ve always liked music that’s funny and has a lot of attitude”

Noticeably absent from the record are the rampantly horny lyrics that last year’s ‘Sex’ EP zoomed in on. While ‘Girls’ and ‘Good Time’ make the cut, that title-track is left behind, shifting the focus of The Dare’s lyricism drastically.

The record’s centrepiece is the outrageously arrogant ‘I Destroyed Disco’ (yes, that is an intentional play on the title of Calvin Harris’ debut album), a Dylan Brady-aided bass monster that was inspired by a photo shoot Harrison did where he smashed up a disco ball (a play on another album, this time the cover of Justin Timberlake’s ‘Future Sex/Love Sounds’), which intends to push a song into the most chaotic territory possible while still being able to call it dance music.

A couple of tracks later, ‘All Night’ marks the tipping point where the night starts taking a turn for the worse; it feels a bit like it’s convincing itself everything is great, but it’s followed by the most surprising track in The Dare’s repertoire yet: ‘Elevation’.

“The album is about one night out, but it’s also really about the last year or two of my life and the people that are in those two years. And of course, not all the relationships are meaningless party gossip-type relationships; that one’s about someone who’s very special to me, but we have a complicated relationship, and I feel like it’s part of the whole reality of my life in the last two years. It was impossible for me not to put at least one song about it on there.

“I’ve just had that experience so many times or watched other people have it, where they start talking about their ex at 2am, and you’re like, uh oh, this party’s not gonna get any better right now.”

Before long, though, it does, and we’re coming up again in the thick of it with ‘Movement’, which pings off every corner of the club and powers through the album’s final stretch. The closer, ‘You Can Never Go Home’, is sparser – if you can dub anything on this record sparse – and has an ominousness to it with its shadowy backing vocal sung by Melody English of fellow New York band Test Subjects, but is brighter and more optimistic than the other tracks here.

“I didn’t want the album to end in a wallowing total wreckage, so it sort of picks itself back up. I don’t know if you want to interpret that as the next morning or something, but it’s definitely not the end of the night. Lyrically, it’s a bit dark. I wanted that one to feel like it’s laying everything on the table and it’s being a bit more honest, and at the same time, it’s all just getting started, you know, everything’s about to begin. It doesn’t have as focused a theme as a song like ‘Girls’ or a song like ‘Perfume’, it’s more like it’s expanding on my character and the emotional palette of The Dare in my music.”

‘What’s Wrong With New York?’ is poised and ready to challenge anyone who thinks they know what a The Dare record would sound like. With the tracks of his that’ve racked up the most streams so far being very sex-focused, the album certainly arrives with a point to prove.

“I would hope it would surprise people. I wouldn’t want to just give them a bunch more of the same. I mean, some of it is similar, but some of it is world building. It’s expanding emotionally and aesthetically. I guess it just depends on how closely you follow me. If you’ve been to the parties and you hear the kind of music I DJ and whatnot, it might be less of a surprise, but I think a lot of people are just finding out about me right now, so they might have no idea what to expect.”

Taken from the October 2024 issue of Dork. The Dare’s album ‘What’s Wrong With New York?’ is out now.