Guess who: A pale, thin, slightly sleazy, ostensibly British man dressed in a black blazer donning sunglasses with a cigarette in hand gallops around the streets of New York.
Who else could it be other than The Dare?
One cannot speak of The Dare without paying homage to Charli XCX, a British singer-songwriter whose recent viral success with her album, “Brat, has launched her, as well as her inner circle, to levels of unprecedented stardom.
One of those said members of the inner circle who has become a star by proxy is 28-year-old producer Harrison Patrick Smith, otherwise known by his stage name, The Dare.
Born in Los Angeles and raised in a suburb right outside of Seattle, Smith’s love story with music was a slow-burn, and it wasn’t until his college years that Smith began to release music on a more consistent basis under the alias “Turtlenecked.”
In an interview with The New York Times, when asked about his signature black suit, Smith had this to say: “All of my musical heroes typically commit to the bit and are larger than life, and the music is never secondary.” Pointing towards David Bowie, the iconic English singer-songwriter known for his flamboyant and glamorous performance style, Smith said “If he was just wearing a T-shirt and jeans, would he be David Bowie? And would you even like the music as much? If there wasn’t that lore around the music, would you even like any of it?”
Smith has become one of Charli’s favorite musical side pieces, frequently spotted alongside her at the myriad of Boiler Room-esque electronic dance parties the latter has been spotted at.
The album is slightly slimy and slightly trashy. It's sexy and sleazy, but in a way that is slightly nausea-inducing and feels as though it is overcompensating for something.
The one gem is his hit track “Girls,” where Smith proclaims his love for all members of the fairer sex: the drug-addicted, orgasm-faking, gun-wielding, God-fearing, sexually-depraved need not fret — all are fair game to The Dare.
“I like the girls that do drugs/ Girls with cigarettes in the back of the club,” Smith chants. “Girls that hate cops and buy guns/ Girls with no buns, girls that's mean just for fun/ I like girls who make love, but I love girls who like to f---.” Here’s an even better one: “I like girls who pregnant.” That’s it. That’s the line.
But Smith gets away with it on this track. Unabashedly debauched, reeling with sheer silliness to a catchy acid bass with a funk synth beat, we’ll give it to him — it’s hard to stand still for this one.
However, as the beats and synths of “What’s Wrong with New York?” recall the cocaine-induced hysteria of an early 2000s club culture, a majority of the time, its aimless tosses of debauched lyricism mixed with adolescent wist feel as though the listener is on their hands and knees parsing between the bad and the worse: “So don't look back tonight/ Tonight is all we know,” Smith sings in “You Can Never Go Home.” “Leave everything behind/ 'Cause you can never go home.”
In “Elevation,” Smith decides he would like to start brooding: “And then I watch as the memory passes/ See you face through these dark sunglasses/ And what I once knew now is just ashes/ Once knew how to be without.”
The meager strength of “What Wrong with New York?” is Smith’s ability to conjure up a catchy beat and an inexplicable intuition of what it is a crowd might be hungry for. His production chops show promise but can’t compensate for the rest of the singer-songwriter toolkit that, at this point in time, is missing.
“What’s Wrong with New York?” is good for an okay time and a TikTok audio clip — but preferably not any longer than that.
