Inspired by people who sneak avant-garde ideas into mainstream forms of art, The Dare is making a racket with his unique brand of abrasive electronica and post-punk, reviving the electroclash scene in his own way.

Meet the suit-donning, sunglasses-sporting, sex-selling artist blazing a trail to keep the party girls partying. Inspired by people who sneak avant-garde ideas into mainstream forms of art, The Dare is making a racket with his unique brand of abrasive electronica and post-punk, reviving the electroclash scene in his own way.

 

On a sunny morning in Los Angeles, Harrison Patrick Smith – better known as The Dare – is sat on his friend’s porch, taking in the peace. Despite the video call interview, it’s a rare moment of quiet for the artist, whose reputation as New York’s party puppeteer has quickly become both a brand and a mirror of his own restless creativity. Fresh off a US tour and poised to fly back to his now-hometown before heading to play in Europe, the artist is sitting in the middle of a cultural moment, finding himself a growing power player in the zeitgeist.

 

Dropping his first album, What’s Wrong with New York? back in September as well as producing for Charli xcx’s phenomenal hit Brat back in June, 2024 has been quite a year. Surrounded by discourse galore, The Dare’s debut resonates as both an existential question and an ironic statement, spotlighting the city that shaped him and his creative community. “There’s nothing’s wrong with it, but at the same time you could say everything’s wrong with it,” he snickers, explaining that one of the key reasons behind the title was to make people ask the question. There’s an awful lot of conversation when it comes to the city that never sleeps: “The music scene, the movie scene, the literary scene, it’s just all super hotly contested”, Harrison explains. “Even in real life in New York, it’s like everybody’s talking shit on everybody else. It just feels like there’s a hotbed right now of exciting art being made in New York, and with that comes a lot of discourse, gossip and drama. And that’s part of just what makes New York, New York.”

 

From his start as Turtlenecked whilst at college in Portland to his reinvention in New York, Harrison has blazed a trail through underground music’s raw, unfiltered spaces. Obsessed with the New York or nowhere attitude that surrounds him, he developed his sonic and aesthetic identity further, founding Freakquencies club night and moonlighting as a DJ whilst working day-to-day teaching English Literature in a West Village school. Emerging onto thescenewith‘Girls’,hisdebutsingleasTheDare, he bottled up the restless, horny energy of the city that adopted him, capturing the post-pandemic angst and allure with nods to the Dimes Square scene.

Despite this – for lack of a more apt word – edgy existence, something that perhaps people wouldn’t expect, is that The Dare does not take himself too seriously. Behind the sunglasses and the smirk, there’s a real self-awareness and even a little self-deprecation. Less a character made up for Seattle suburb-born Harrison Patrick Smith to hide behind, The Dare is an extension of himself, one who performs and parades but mostly just one who creates. Where does one end and the other begin, you might wonder? “It’s impossible to say”, he laughs, “Because at the beginning, being in a band or making music was something that I did all the time, but it wasn’t necessarily my lifestyle. Now my lifestyle is music 24/7. So if anything, the distinction has gotten more and more blurry.”

 

“I notice this every day: when I spend time with a person, I become a different person to them,” he contemplates. “There are certain people who I’m just funnier around or certain people who make me more quiet – and uninteresting too probably – just because they bring that out in me. The Dare is just the side of me that comes out when I sit down to write, and when I go on stage to sing: that’s the best way to describe it.”

 

That does beg the question, though, of if there are things that The Dare would do that Harrison would not? “It’s more there are things that I want to say, and one of the great things about art is that you’re allowed to roam freely. You’re allowed to say things that you can’t say at the dinner table. That’s always been super important to me about art, movies, music, literature; I’m always looking for people who are using that freedom of expression with the use of fiction or exaggeration. Otherwise, everything that undoubtedly is spurring on the ‘poster boy of indie sleaze’ declarations. With anybody making anything today, so come the inevitable comparisons across social media and amongst certain circles. For Harrison, it’s the LCD Soundsystem and indie sleaze of it all. The Dare isn’t afraid of that though, he’s aware of it all, he’s happy to be mentioned in the same breath, he knows he’s doing his own thing. “I always loved music from the 2000s. I fell in love with electroclash like five years ago. At that point in time, indie sleaze was just a budding fashion descriptor; there wasn’t really any music associated with that label.”

Supposedly officially coined in 2021, it’s become somewhat of an all-encompassing term that many of Gen Z (arguably mis)use: “I always thought the label was kind of ugly and confused”, Harrison agrees. “It would refer to Y2K things, but it would also refer to things that are from later in 2009 or 2010 or something. Those are just wildly different times for music, fashion and culture. I think what they get at with the term is just that it’s dirty. It’s a little bit dangerous. It’s kind of sloppy, it’s very hedonistic and party-centric. And it’s just very fashion. A lot of those are things that I’m interested would be non-fiction, and I just think it’s kind of boring. So, that freedom is very, very important to me.”

 

When looking for the meeting point of both the intellectual as well as the brazen, we discuss, lyrics are important. “I am a big fan of lyricism, it’s just as important to me as the melody or the beat. Music is storytelling in one way or another, more or less abstract. Everything I consume on a literary level, or movies or other songs or poetry, it all influences what I do.” As an ex-teacher, Harrison looks to all sorts of places for inspiration, speaking about what had the greatest impact in the literary sphere, he shares “Tropic of Cancer by Henry Miller, poetry by Frederick Seidel for sure. Nick Cave too, and Emily Dickinson’s poetry was really important for me in college. Working within those limitations of rhyme scheme or metre totally changes the way you write. Having to be really, really efficient is something I feel like I’ve gotten better at over time from reading other poets.”

 

Lyrically, The Dare opens his debut with the words “It’s just rock’n’roll, you won’t die”. It’s an Alex Turner at the 2014 Brit Awards kind of sentiment – neither you nor rock’n’roll itself will die – and one in and I’ve always liked. It’s what I liked about electroclash. So I’m not offended to be associated with them at all. It sort of happened that I was just making the music that I really liked and this cultural thing lined up at the same time.”

 

Of course, a major aspect of that aesthetic trend and cultural phenomenon comes from a desperation for connection and togetherness. In a post-lockdown world, the partygoers among us were begging for the freedom and community of the dancefloor. Capturing that physicality in his music was paramount to The Dare, using “raw, primitive sounds” to create “a very social kind of music”. He explains, “Post-bedroom pop and COVID, there just was such an interest in creating music that sounded like it was made in a room with a bunch of other people. Even if that wasn’t true, the feeling you get from that is special to me.”

What’s Wrong With New York certainly captures that, it’s curated chaos and utterly visceral. “I’m making stuff that verges on dance music,” he muses “I want people to move to it. All my favourite music is physical in some way. And all of my favourite performers are. Iggy Pop, or John Maus; anybody who has extreme physical energy on stage is what makes it a more exciting show. I grew up loving hardcore, going to a lot of punk shows and I still like to jump around, chug, mosh and all that.” An unintentional concept album, The Dare’s debut full-length project very much takes you through the stage of a night out. From ‘Open Up’ to ‘You Can Never Go Home’, it’s a journey of decadence in all forms – drugs, clubs, and a whole lot of sex – and takes you through all the senses, it’s as physical as it is psychological.

 

It’s definitely why, then, The Dare was the perfect match for Charli xcx’s Brat era. Developing her own alter-ego for her sixth album, Harrison brought ‘Guess’ and its Billie Eilish remix version to life. “I’m very fortunate that people are excited by what I’m doing and that they want to hear what it would sound like for somebody else to sing on a Dare song or to have those two worlds kind of merge”, he describes when discussing producing for other artists. “I typically just try and do me as much as possible: I find it really interesting when two artists smash head-on. In high school, I was obsessed with Danny Brown as well as Hudson Mohawke, and I couldn’t understand why they didn’t make a song together. I would just be listening to them back-to-back thinking their music’s so wacky it would just be magic. From collaborations, I want people to resist the urge to make something that’s in the middle of everything, instead crank up their own personalities and run into each other at full speed. I think that’s what me and Charli did.”

Inspired by how Charli xcx has handled the finite balance between underground influence and pop success post-Brat, Harrison was offered a glimpse into the workload of a commercially successful artist. “After experiencing the music industry in real life, you realise how insanely difficult it is to do both of those things at the same time. Charli makes it look really, really easy, but it’s actually very, very hard. There are forces that are trying to make you not do that all the time. And when people start paying attention or you worry about things outside of yourself. But that balance is super important to me: all of my favourite artists have snuck avant- garde ideas into mainstream forms of art. I think that’s kind of my responsibility and like, what makes me excited about making pop music.”

 

Harrison’s vision as The Dare goes beyond the usual boundaries of music, experiential and raw, he seeks to break down the confines of genre and expectation. Whether drawing on unexpected sources to keep his work multidimensional – “I’ll see a horror movie that is so over the top and be inspired to push my songwriting further… or I’ll spot a cool outfit and want to make a song for the girl wearing it, ‘cause she looks like she needs soundtrack” – or keeping club culture alive and kicking, his curiosity is intoxicating. Deeply connected to the scene that helped form who he is today, The Dare is just getting started, giving us a new generation of club classics and bringing back the debauchery of old.

Up next, Harrison Patrick Smith is keeping on keeping on, always looking ahead. “I’m very, very excited to write right now. I’ve been writing for the past month but January and February I’m going to sort of isolate myself and just write”, he confides. “I feel excited by the many potential directions and influences I can incorporate now that I’m sort of established. I think it’s an exciting time to be The Dare.”

Listen to What's Wrong With New York? now: