The Dare delays our 10am interview by an hour. “He’s been having trouble sleeping,” explains his publicist. When he emerges bleary-eyed on Zoom at 11, I ask what’s been keeping him awake, wondering if he was out late. Apparently not. “But I actually have a harder time sleeping when I stay in,” he growls. “I go out so much that there’s a natural rhythm. I walk around all night and eventually get tired. When I stay in, I feel like I have too much pent-up energy. So I just lay there all night.”
If you don’t know who the Dare is yet, that’s understandable. Despite how he dresses (almost always in a Hedi Slimane-esque skinny black suit) and the manner in which he answers questions about mild insomnia, he’s not a rock star yet. More of a microcelebrity, extremely well known to a certain subset of downtown New York scene kids, fans of Charli xcx’s future pop, the glossy magazine class and the incurably online.
But those people know a lot about him. They know that he’s a provocateur, snarling through a distorted vintage microphone about all the things he’d like to do to the women who can’t resist him. They know that he looks extremely British but is in fact a mainstay of Manhattan, normally seen falling out of his own club night Freakquencies, where he spins 00s French touch and 10s hipster rap to a reverential crowd of it-boys and girls.
They know he courts controversy: the internet got in a tizzy about his breakthrough single Girls, a paean to how insatiably horny he is (key lyric: “I’d probably fuck a hole in the wall”) and the short-lived storm about the cover artwork for The Sex EP that showed clothed simulated sex with young-looking women. And they know he’s already on an unstoppable slide into actual superstardom, being booked as a DJ everywhere from Miami’s Art Basel to Boiler Room in Ibiza and having just produced Guess, Charli’s global hit with Billie Eilish, in the video of which he wiggles impassively.
So I’m braced for a sunglasses-wearing newly minted ego ready to drop some braggadocious quotes. But such a person is nowhere to be found. Instead, I’m introduced to Harrison Patrick Smith, the Dare’s alter ego, a sweet, considerate music nerd from the suburbs of Seattle who has seemingly read every music magazine and band autobiography, and is now – with oodles of measured self-awareness – trying to transform himself into one of the rock stars he’s obsessed with.
“I just sit down at my desk and I try new things,” he says, revealing the studious way he arrived at his spontaneous persona. “I was trying out a Jonathan Richman kind of effect. I was just super-obsessed with [his band] the Modern Lovers. That changed what I was excited about in my own music.”
With this as his starting point, he began adding in other influences: club nights that closed their doors when he was still in nappies (Trash in London, Misshapes in New York); today’s teen rapper Nettspend sampling 2000s alt-rockers Deftones; the lyricism of Bronx rapper Cash Cobain; the unreliable narration of middle-era Jarvis Cocker. He said he’s going to make sure he’s at the Oasis reunion shows too. “It’s like you’re about to pop this bottle of champagne you’ve been shaking for 15 years. I want to be part of that.”
But his main point of reference quickly became mid-00s electroclash and art-punk, when bands such as the Rapture, Chicks on Speed, Peaches and Cut Copy were using synthesisers and heavily processed guitar to make indie kids dance. At points, his music sounds almost litigiously similar to some of those groups, which has led many to brand him the poster-boy for “indie sleaze”, a term for Gen Z’s obsession with 2009 aesthetics – those days when Uffie partied late with New Young Pony Club and getting on the Skins soundtrack could make a career.
For someone with such a broad palette, I point out, he’s ended up aping a lot of also-rans and half-a-hit wonders. “Yeah,” he says. “It feels like a risky thing to do. I’m not cribbing from the winners of history. People hated electroclash at the time. Some people thought it was a joke. But the music just spoke to me. I felt understood by the Rapture.”
So if the Dare has spent a lifetime doing a PhD in indie culture, then this week he’s releasing his dissertation, his debut album. What’s Wrong With New York? is an immaculately produced piece of 2005 pastiche that opens with a distorted amp sound and the Dare slurring the words, “It’s just rock’n’roll, it won’t die” to a chorus of party kids shouting “Open up your eyes, open up your legs.” It continues in much the same vein, trying to recreate a specific moment when putting a synthesiser in an indie song was the height of ingenuity and being sleazy wasn’t considered a bad thing.
Whether you like it really depends on how much you liked that music the first time around, but perhaps enjoying the Dare does not necessarily mean loving his songs. Some of his other interviewers have described the record as “unabashedly debauched”, “cocky”, “low-brow”, “hedonistic”, “vapid and puerile”, “laugh-out-loud” and “an overindulged paean to privilege”. Does it bother him to be judged so gauche?
“No, not at all,” he says. “That’s exactly what I was going for. I want it to be funny. I want it to be a drunk punch in the face. At times, I want it to sound dumber than it actually is.” He says he doesn’t want to be bound by “maturity, realism or seriousness” and that algorithms have pushed music into being “an easy listening experience”. He wants to make sounds that people engage with “confrontationally”.
“I always think of a review by Brent DiCrescenzo of a Momus record,” Smith says, referring to the Pitchfork critic and the cult Scottish singer-songwriter. “He’s talking about how Momus’s album is stuffed with these amazing lyrical ideas and concepts, but it’s just too fucking European. He says our [Americanised] ears want to be fucked by big, sexy chords and rhythms. I think the best music has to work on both those levels. It has to have some sort of sexy physical element to it, and an intellectual side to it as well. I think most people feel that way.”
The downside of the Dare’s ability to meticulously explain the persona he’s trying to manufacture is that it’s hard to really believe in something that’s quite so shrewdly created. He says all his favourite acts, from Berlin-era Lou Reed to Bowie’s Thin White Duke, have “committed to the bit” when it comes to stagecraft. But in showing his working, he’s doing the opposite. If the Dare is just an astute construct and not a boyish agitator, well, to put it in his terms, it’s a bit less sexy.
“I mean, the Dare is not a persona per se,” he replies. “There are elements that are real and there are elements that are supersized. It’s definitely an expression of my id, but the id is still within me. It’s not something I just made up. I find it a lot more interesting in music when the line between fiction and reality is blurred.”
The real Harrison Patrick Smith grew up in the suburbs of Seattle, cut off from any culture. “There was no dancing, no nothing,” he says. “I was just trying to read and learn about the history of music.” Still, there was something about him: he wore purple skinny jeans and could play every instrument. His classmates voted him “most likely to be rock star”. When he went to college he played in a semi-successful punk band called Turtlenecked, but found greater release throwing parties in his dorm room, with a strobe light he bought on Amazon, playing Sophie tracks off Spotify. He got a taste for the power of making people dance.
After college, he moved to New York, launching Freakquencies. “It was very chaotic. There was a lot of debauchery and drunkenness. There was a girl one night who punched five people in the face. It was just word of mouth, everyone became friends.” The club night was also a captive audience to experiment with. He’d play early versions of the Dare tracks, and hype up his debut EP, which was released last summer.
Charli xcx private messaged him shortly afterwards, including some vocals – and before he knew it, he had two songs on her album. “There’s so much music that has a billion plays on streaming services but doesn’t exist in the real world. It’s just playlist fodder. Charli is the antithesis of that. People can’t shut up about her. So it’s super-inspiring to see someone command this fucking thing, making music that’s cool and abrasive on that scale.”
It’s time to wrap up our interview. He needs to get his suit dry-cleaned in time for another photoshoot. Perhaps, if the album sells well, he’ll be able to buy a spare one. Maybe, I suggest, when this week is over, he’ll be able to get some sleep.
“No,” he says. “I mean, the reason I live in New York and not in LA or someplace else is because I want to meet people and stay out late and sleep all day. Fortunately, making music is a lifestyle that kind of allows for this. I’m just travelling around so much doing red-eye flights that it helps to be a little bit vampiric.”
Perhaps the real Dare only comes out at night.
• What’s Wrong With New York? by the Dare is out now
