The Dare, reluctant poster-boy for indie sleaze: ‘People want to return to a dirtier, less fashionable era’

On any given day before 2pm, you will find The Dare in bed. “Nothing interesting tends to happen before two in the afternoon,” he says emphatically. It’s exactly the sort of cool, blasé thing you’d expect to hear from the man and musician leading New York’s club scene down a rabbit hole of debauched decadence.

It’s gone 10am when we speak and The Dare, albeit awake, is indeed in bed. Not at home, mind you, but in a hotel room in Paris where the 28-year-old continues his sold-out tour on the heels of his debut album What’s Wrong with New York? The record itself arrived on the back of a big-time collaboration with Charli XCX and Billie Eilish, as well as his own viral hit “Girls” – a tongue-in-cheekly misogynistic electro-clash paean to all the women he’d like to sleep with. A diverse category, it turns out, ranging from the obvious (“girls who like to f***”) to the silly (“girls who got so much hair on they ass, it clogs the drain”).

Such a quick succession of events, combined with the added allure of his beguilingly formal uniform, a suit and skinny tie à la Paul Weller circa 1977, has given rise to one question: who is The Dare?

Harrison Patrick Smith devised the moniker when he was still working as a substitute school teacher in New York two years ago. In person, he has little of the braggadocio of his alter ego. Smith’s is a quiet confidence, evident in the way he reclines in bed mid-interview and how casually he deploys a bookish knowledge of music history. He does, though, share The Dare’s look: a Sixties mod mop and endearingly gap-toothed smile. (Not since Renée Zellweger in Bridget Jones has an American looked so British.)

“There’s a lot of musicians who just live their songs and are their songs, sort of life-to-paper kind of songwriting,” he says. “I think mine is a wackier path to the page – or the mp3 or whatever.” That said, Smith loves to party as much as his songs suggest. “I don’t do much except make music and go out,” he says. A professional party animal if you will.

Smith isn’t the only one. Certainly, there’s something in the air (the smell of tequila, cigarettes, and vomit perhaps) that marks the ongoing resurgence of indie sleaze, that hedonistic subculture of the late aughts and mid-2010s spurred on by pills and powders. Think Uffie, Justice, Daft Punk, LCD Soundsystem. It’s scuzzy basslines and sex in bathrooms. What’s Wrong with New York? wears its influences on its tailored, tattered sleeve; Smith’s North Star is the sound of The Rapture, godparents of electro-clash. How much you enjoy The Dare will depend on how much you enjoyed indie sleaze the first time around. Cool kid or pretentious poseur, you decide. Smith doesn’t care either way.

“People feel really, really excited by it, or they feel really, really angry about it,” says Smith. Angry in what way? “There’s plenty of different reasons why, but I think the character, my personality and the kind of music that I make is so masculine and over the top in your face – that people are either excited by it or feel like it’s f***ing annoying and uncool.”

While Smith is hardly a household name, mention The Dare in certain circles and the response is feverish – and polarising. Smith has earned a reputation as a provocateur – though he, himself, can’t see what’s so provoking about lyrics about seducing your mum or being so horny that he’d f*** a hole in the wall. “It’s insane to me, but I’ll take it,” he smiles. “It sounds cool.” In fact, his most provocative act to date was purely accidental. In May 2023, Smith released The Sex EP, the cover of which – depicting simulated, clothed sex with young-looking people – got him accused of promoting paedophilia in the Daily Mail.

open image in gallery

If anything, the reaction came as a huge shock. “Nobody in my world found it provocative,” he says. “It was just a surprise that people even cared.” Was he affected by the torrent of hate, the death threats that followed? “I always think of that old Tyler, the Creator tweet.” The tweet in question goes something like: “How is cyber-bullying real? Just walk away from the screen.” Smith recites this with a shrug. “I can literally log off.”

To hear Smith tell it, this indie sleaze resurgence is down to three main things: Covid, social media, and boredom. “People want to let loose and have fun with really aggressive, loud bass,” he says. “Then there’s the panopticon of social media; people want to return to an era that was dirtier and less fashionable when we didn’t care so much about being sweaty.” Lastly, he adds, “The dominating style of indie music has been this smooth, introverted bedroom pop – some of it very, very good – but I think people miss the extroverted nature of other styles of music.” He exhales, “That’s my theory on it.”

Smith knows a thing or two about what’s happening in the scene. Some say he is the scene. “Poster boy for the indie sleaze revival” is a common epithet. “I guess it’s better than working at a gas station,” he says, curiously indifferent to the role he’s been assigned. “I don’t think anybody likes getting labelled anything except ‘creative genius’ or ‘visionary artist of our lives’.” He laughs, but on a serious note, the label can be limiting.

“It’s like if you were to call The Beatles a British pop band, that would be wildly misleading as to what The Beatles are in the world,” Smith says. “There’s truth in the whole indie sleaze thing, but I just hate those words a lot.” It may be the way of the industry, but that doesn’t mean he has to like it.

Born to a psychotherapist and a medical equipment salesman, Smith had a suburban upbringing in the suburbs of Seattle. “It was never really a socially, culturally ‘on fire’ place to be,” he says. When he was four, his parents bought him a violin, which he traded in for a guitar at 12. At school, he was on the fringes of most social circles, though he was still invited to parties either directly or through a friend. “I was definitely a Perks of Being a Wallflower-style individual,” he says.

Attending college outside Portland, he studied English literature because music didn’t feel like a viable option. “I was obsessed with it, but I never ever put any stock into it as a job,” he says. Still, he found outlets for that side of himself, releasing a steady stream of music as Turtlenecked.

Turtlenecked – mostly innocuous indie rock – feels worlds away from The Dare. On one track, the Mitski-esque titled “Meeting You in the Hospital”, he sings of “patriarchal white male bullshit”. Smith cringes when I bring it up. “That was 2015, different time, different dude,” he says. “At that point, I didn’t even like music like that but there was something culturally where it felt like I should sing about this or do that, and it wasn’t really authentic to me.”

Smith is, he clarifies, “politically passionate” but “the more I thought about what music I wanted to make and the better I got at it, the less interested I became in saying overtly political things in my songs”. Regarding Spinal Tap’s “fine line between clever and stupid”, Smith is happy to fall within the latter. “That’s the difference between the old music I made and what I make now,” he says. “Back then, I was trying to seem really smart. Now I’m trying to seem really stupid, or at least, trying to be simple because I find that much more exciting and endearing. I feel like my music isn’t stupid enough, honestly.”

Many of his best songs were concocted off-the-cuff in a carefree, pre-party state of mind. “It makes me treat the music-making process a little less seriously and I have fun ideas that way,” Smith says. Take, for example, “Guess”, his supercharged, bass-blown mega-club hit with Charli XCX and Billie Eilish, co-produced with Dylan Brady of hyper-pop duo 100 gecs.

“I had an early version of that song neither of us were excited by,” he recalls. “Then Charli came to town for the Met Gala, and I was throwing one of my parties that weekend, so I made a jacked-up club version for the event and sent it to her, and she was like” – Smith feigns his best Essex deadpan – “That’s the song. That’s it.” Similarly, Smith first wrote “Girls” as a joke to send to his friends. He finished a first demo within a few hours in the bedroom of his East Williamsburg flat. “My ex-girlfriend was like, ‘Do not release this.’” Eventually, of course, he did. “I hold that over her a lot,” he laughs.

As his star rises, his venues become larger, and his suits fancier (these days, he rotates between three Gucci ensembles), the line between Smith and The Dare is blurring. People are coming up to him more in the street stunned to find he is not the foul-mouthed playboy of his lyrics. “They’ll literally tell me that I’m not who they thought I’d be,” he says. The other day, he came home to find a horde of NYU students on his fire escape. “That was weird,” he winces. “But the blurring stuff, I don’t mind either way. I like wearing a suit all the time. It looks good.”

‘What’s Wrong with New York’ is out now. The Dare will perform four nights in London on 20, 22, 26, and 27 November; more information here