Forget your bedroom pop playlist – THE DARE is here to drag you onto the dance floor and make you question your life choices. Check out the latest cover story for our New Music Friday playlist edit, PLAY.
Words: Abigail Firth.
Photos: Jennifer McCord.
The suit wearer to indie superstar pipeline is one well-travelled. Each decade summons an act whose ability to sling on some formal wear makes them an instant icon; look at The Beatles, Bowie and Byrne’s mid-late century stage looks, or turn of the millennium bands like Interpol, The Hives, and LCD Soundsystem. But it’s a certain signature Gucci suit and its devotee that’s caught the attention of both the internet and the New York club circuit as the 2020s gets well underway.
The Dare (Harrison Patrick Smith to his mates) is practically the face of the indie sleaze aesthetic AND an apparent electroclash revival. His New York club night Freakquencies is a regular sell-out and a driving force in the city’s chaotic party resurgence; he’s already been name-dropped in a Charli XCX track, oh, and until today, the world had only heard four The Dare songs.
To say there’s an appetite for more would be an understatement. Anyone who’s anyone is salivating over Harrison’s next move, waiting for a taste of what could follow up 2023’s ‘Sex’ EP, which, ICYMI, is the outrageously raunchy horn-fest that could’ve soundtracked a 2006 house party.
When we sit down, it’s been less than 12 hours since Harrison went to bed (it’s 4.30pm), as the early hours of his morning involved ignoring security when they asked him to stop a stage invasion at a London edition of his club night Freakquencies.
“There’s a British guy I love on TikTok, who made one recently about partying where he was starting it with ‘Fight For Your Right’ by the Beastie Boys,” Harrison starts illustrating The Dare’s origin story, adopting a British accent for the next portion. “And he was like, ‘A lot of people think that this on TikTok is the party, this is not the party’.” (He drops the accent.) “And he was like, you need to get together with your friends and get drunk and dance in real life because a lot of people, they’re nostalgic for 2007 or 2002, or whatever, and all of those bands met at parties. They made music for parties, for people to have fun to and dance to.”
Born in 1996 (he’s a Pisces, btw) and raised in the suburbs of Seattle, Harrison missed out on the era he regularly calls back to. His teenagedom was instead submerged in the pre-bedroom-pop of the 2010s.
“Then I think for a long time, in the 2010s, people started making music in their bedrooms for other people in their bedrooms. I think that became during the pandemic, uninteresting. Because eventually, the medium is the message, and it just became boring bedroom music. During COVID, everybody was like, well, I don’t want to be in my bedroom; I want to have fun. I think the music that a lot of the bands in New York are making is much more sensual than intellectual sometimes, and I don’t think that’s a bad thing at all. It’s just like, a lot of the bands prioritise physical movement and fun and dynamics over like, diaristic ‘I went to the store today, and I thought about you, and I cried’, you know? It’s not music you can have sex to or dance to or whatever.”
“When you start making music for people to dance to, it changes the way you write”
Harrison Patrick Smith
The latter is basically what Harrison was doing until 2020. His last project, Turtlenecked, favoured something wordier and janglier, still pulling from the 2000s indie scene but leaning more towards Modest Mouse or Grizzly Bear. If Turtlenecked was made for Seth Cohen’s iPod, The Dare is for Steve Stifler’s.
Post-lockdown, Harrison began DJing in New York, and his club night, which took place every Thursday, quickly took off, the music following suit. There, he’d spin 20-year-old dance tracks from Daft Punk, The Chemical Brothers, and The Knife, alongside rowdy indie from Primal Scream and Death From Above 1979, and random additions like Texas’ ‘Inner Smile’. It completely changed Harrison’s outlook as a musician.
“I guess it was just DJing, really,” he says. “I started doing that every week in New York and throwing my little party. Watching it happen in real time was a super enlightening experience because previously, I had just been making music for people to listen to on their headphones. That’s a very different way of writing and going about the way you think about music and where you expect it to live. When you start making music for people to dance to, or hear over like a shitty club sound system, it changes the way you write and like where you expect things to end up. And I just started having a lot of fun doing that because I’d never written music for that environment or made people dance, and when I realised I could do it, I just wanted to see how far I could take it, and you know, what would be funny to hear while you’re dancing? Or what would make you excited to hear while you’re dancing?”
Whatever he was going for, he’s nailed it. His debut single ‘Girls’ is effectively a rewrite of the Calvin Harris track of the same name; a similar subject matter (read: a lengthy list of female traits he finds attractive), tongue-in-cheek lyrics it’s almost shocking he’s gotten away with, and a storming electronic beat built for drunken nightclub basements.
The rest of the ‘Sex’ EP is, well, exactly what it says on the tin. The title track is even more sardonic, with a sparser beat and funnier lyrics, while ‘Good Time’ features The Dare’s truest statement of intent: “I’m in the club while you’re online”. It’s a glorious hodgepodge of decades worth of references, hitting most obviously LCD Soundsystem (a comparison that’s less frequent now but never caused offence, one of Harrison’s all-time favourites), but also the ambiguity of Jarvis Cocker’s storytelling, plus the pure electroclash of The Rapture, and unmissably, the heavily sexual content borrowed from artists like Peaches and DJ Assault.
“I love performers, and I love people who tell stories and you don’t really know if it’s true or not”
Harrison Patrick Smith
“It’s just cool. I mean, like booty bass and his whole aesthetic, it’s so simple,” he says of DJ Assault. “The song will have basically one lyric over and over that’s usually like a sex or dancing theme or something in between, and then he’ll bring in one more lyric halfway through that riffs on the original idea. It’s so minimal and the intention of the music is so direct. And it’s really funny.”
The Dare is sort of a character, maybe a version of Harrison with the arrogance dialled up to 11. There’s an immediate difference between his on-stage and off-stage self; he’s more reserved and definitely less keen on fingering a Tesco’s Finest white chocolate and raspberry cake in our photo shoot than his lyrics would have you believe. There’s some honesty in the music (yes, even that one lyric about a girl’s bum being so hairy it clogged the drain), but there’s also an element of just doing it for a laugh, which makes it even more enticing.
“It’s not very complicated. It’s partially true; sometimes it’s like, completely true, and sometimes it’s not true at all. It just depends on my mood. I’ve never written a lyric that wasn’t something I felt or thought about in a genuine way, but at the same time, I love performers, and I love people who crank up their feelings and do it over the top or even tell stories about other people, and you don’t really know if it’s true or not.”
We hear the follow-up to the EP, ‘Perfume’, for the first time in a Brighton pub (through wired Apple earbuds, as God intended). It shares the same blueprint as other The Dare tracks, this time with amped up guitars, and despite the comparisons slowing, it sounds more like ‘Daft Punk Is Playing At My House’ than anything else Harrison’s done.
“All the music I hear, and all the people I meet, happens for the most part between 10pm and 4am”
Harrison Patrick Smith
For his first track drop in over a year, it makes sense that Harrison would want to go full Dare-core. While ‘Perfume’ may be another serving of the usual for those familiar with The Dare, he has no worries about being seen as one-dimensional.
“I think an album of only sex-themed music can be a bit much. Most musicians make so many different kinds of music, and it’s just like a superhuman effort to make it appear as like a very focused, intense thing. So there are some people who just do one thing: if I was like that, I might be worried, but I’m not.”
The track serves as a taster for his album ‘WHAT’S WRONG WITH NEW YORK?’, which we’ve been promised won’t abandon the aesthetics of the ‘Sex’ EP but will branch out into new sonic territories and encapsulate the whole night out.
“The album is loosely grounded by that world. At first, I was inventing music for the club, and then the club is sort of inventing the story of my life after a certain point where I was just doing that all the time. Everything in my life has been taking place at night in the last year or two. All the music I hear, and all the people I meet, happens for the most part between 10pm and 4am. I hope it reflects those experiences, but it’s not necessarily like, we’re gonna party and have so much fun, though. It’s a crazy way to live, and a lot of people experience a little bit of it; I think I experienced a little more than most people, and I want to convey all the different subtleties and not-so-subtle things about life at night.”
As Harrison’s life keeps getting crazier, the listeners are absolutely invited to join in the fun, whether that be at the club, online, through the blown speakers or their headphones. ■
The Dare’s debut album ‘WHAT’S WRONG WITH NEW YORK?’ is out 6th September. Follow Dork’s PLAY Spotify playlist here.
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