Within the stairwell of Electrical Woman Studios a number of weeks in the past, Harrison Patrick Smith, 28, was handed a hanger sporting a nondescript pair of pants and a T-shirt. “Oh, my avenue garments!” he mentioned and laughed, barely perceptibly clenching a low fist at his facet. “Sure!”
Smith, who information dance rock that he characterizes as an “electroclash revival” with a “super-sized angle” as the couragehe is not all the time in his signature clear black swimsuit, and he would not all the time desire it. However you would be forgiven for considering in any other case, as he is been noticed doing it quite a bit recently: performing dwell, attending vogue reveals, capturing music movies, at events.
“All of my musical characters are likely to decide to the half and are bigger than life, and the music isn’t secondary,” Smith defined earlier that day. “The little factor” — on this case, the costume — “develops the story of the music or additional sparks the listener’s curiosity or creativeness.”
He referenced David Bowie’s persona in Skinny White Duke. “If he was simply in a t-shirt and denims, would he be David Bowie? And would you just like the music that a lot?” Smith continued. “If you did not have this erudition about music, would you like all of it?” he requested, not with out seriousness.
Arising on the discharge of his debut album, What’s Fallacious With New York? (out September 6), mentioning Dare to anybody with an opinion about him is bound to impress a robust opinion.
Like that swimsuit and his earlier output—even its title—What’s Fallacious With New York? is lyrically and musically daring, massive in sound, idea and character. It is going to be taken as (relying in your persuasion) pointless and infantile, or as a genuinely humorous, joyous, laugh-out-loud, self-aware testomony to the facility of cheek; as a love letter to being younger and hedonistic in New York, or as an overindulgence of privilege; and because the product of both the newest in a protracted line of over-the-top downtown darlings, or somebody within the grand custom of pop making music for music.
Or, maybe, all of this stuff without delay.
However as his personal information continues to take form, the truth is, if not horny, actually fascinating. The album is a good 10-track flex of Smith’s formidable manufacturing abilities, which vary from winking to bald in his referential debt to early New York dance rock (LCD Soundsystem, Yeah Yeah Yeahs, Fischerspooner). This period itself was indebted to 80s post-punk and no-wave (Gang of 4, ESG, Liquid Liquid), all bands whose music as soon as performed in New York golf equipment like APT and Illuminated salonat events hosted by Todd P and Justin D.
In dialog, Smith strikes seamlessly within the thrall of musical references: The Fall, Daft Punk, Kompakt Information, Artwork Brut, Kim Gordon, Veraco, Richard Hell, Sabrina Carpenter and even Third Eye Blind. In response to questions by way of e-mail, Charli XCX referred to as him “encyclopedic about music in a means that I am by no means.”
Dare’s origin story is the stuff of decided, wild-eyed suburbanites. He grew up outdoors Seattle with a psychotherapist mom and a father (since deceased) who was a charismatic medical tools salesman. Not significantly musically inclined, they nonetheless had Smith be taught violin at 4, which he changed with guitar at 12. At 16, he realized to play the drums. All through, Smith frolicked finding out music by digging by CDs within the library and looking on-line.
Attending faculty outdoors of Portland, he launched a gradual stream of music as Turtlenecked—often twee, expertly composed sonorous rock—and continued after shifting to New York in 2018 whereas substitute instructing to make ends meet.
In 2020, in the midst of the pandemic, Smith took a extra playful strategy and shortly wrote and recorded the track “girls” in his bed room in East Williamsburg. Over a throbbing synth line with an exploding refrain, he poked enjoyable at lewd lyrical provocations—which was precisely the purpose.
“I similar to music that annoys folks in a technique or one other, and I do not like music that performs within the background in a espresso store,” Smith mentioned, “and I do not suppose my music will ever do this.” Nonetheless, he added: “I do not suppose my music is that provocative to be sincere.”
Mileage could range in accordance with this declare. In underneath two minutes of “Women,” Dare proclaims his affection for many who are pregnant, tall, petite, murderous, sadistic, leisure drug customers, faculty educated, indoor people who smoke, faux orgasms, and Dare haters. Launched in August 2022, the observe took off in New York and by the top of the yr, Dare was filling small venues with a frenzied audienceexploding on streaming playlists and critics’ lists at the end of the year.
“Music is a particular place the place you may break away from these conventional social norms and niceties,” Smith mentioned. “It is a liberating expertise to sit down down and do issues which might be thrilling and bigger than life, and never stick with actuality on a regular basis.” Certainly, one other fact: Smith, not like Dare, is soft-spoken, well-mannered , bordering on shy and vulnerable to bouts of unrestrained seriousness.
After signing with Republic in Might 2023, Smith opted out “The Sex EP”, to which Dare suggests (amongst different issues) that your mom may wish to have intercourse (with him). The duvet, depicting simulated (albeit clothed) intercourse, precipitated outrage on-line and within the media; it additionally generated favorable press protection, heralding the following massive factor.
All that stress on so little music might be a prelude to both an abject failure or an extremely auspicious begin. The expertise — particularly the occasions of the previous few weeks — has been “completely loopy,” Smith mentioned. “I simply had no thought it was even going to occur.”
This is what occurred: After listening to “Women,” Charli XCX reached out by way of Instagram (“complete shock”), and Smith produced “guess” her sultry thumper, culminating in a shrill burst of distorted bass synths. in August a remix featuring Billie Eilish has droppedcatapulting Dare into a brand new stratosphere of fame, simply weeks earlier than the arrival of his debut album.
His different well-known followers embody journeyman DJ Avalon Emerson and Dylan Brady of the avant-garde pop duo 100 hexeswho labored on “Guess” in addition to a number of songs on Smith’s album. Reached by telephone, Brady identified the “boldness of the lyrics, melodies and sound sources” of Dare’s music. Smith, he defined, “appears to have a transparent imaginative and prescient of what he is attempting to do, and he is capable of do it.”
Charli XCX agreed: “To put in writing the lyrics he writes, it’s a must to have a sure stage of fearlessness mixed with humor, understanding how you can write a track plus letting go of all of the stuff you ‘ought to’ do, do, to write down a track,” she wrote.
“I actually consider Harrison goes to be one of many subsequent massive pop producers,” she continued. “Somebody who helps artists discover their sound, provides them probably the most thrilling information, that type of factor.”
“Give it 5 years. He could have his fingerprints on many nice albums.
Again at Electrical Woman, Smith arranges the ultimate observe from his album, “You Can By no means Go Dwelling.”
“I believed it will be nice to finish the album with—as a substitute of bowing to it and type of ending the story—like: It is simply begun, a prelude to one thing larger,” he mentioned, smiling and shrugging as if to acknowledged the bombast of what he had simply mentioned. “What is the level, you understand? To do larger issues.”
The observe opens with a giant, sparse electrical piano line, builds from there, and is as near an anthem as Dare will get – a track about going out tonight, residing within the current and never wanting again. “I used to be attempting to discuss with that justice quote, really,” Smith defined, “the place they had been speaking about how they needed to make music when a wrestler entered the sector.
Ever the showman, he saved considered one of his greatest methods for final. Should you’re a Dare fan or Dare lover, it is laborious to not smile — if not an outright smile — on the track’s opening verse:
“Generally I sing only one observe,” he sings, stretching out the final phrase earlier than shifting on to the following line, “generally I steal what others have written.” As he sings it, he stretches out the final phrase once more, however this time ever so barely, bending the pitch, altering the observe.
