By Charley Burns
“Brat Summer” left the older generations with a lot of questions, but personally, the concept of “brat” wasn’t my main point of confusion when it came to this summer’s return of indie sleaze. My main question was: what is the deal with the lanky brunette in sunglasses and a suit who always seems to be behind Charli XCX? And I guess Obama likes his songs? Also, why is Charli asking us to send him her underwear in “Guess?” I don’t think I’m alone in this confusion. All of this contributes to The Dare’s gimmick, making him as well as his new album What’s Wrong With New York? an enigma to me and my fellow Brat enjoyers.
The Dare isn’t the first musical persona held by 28-year-old Harrison Patrick Smith. He used the name Turtlenecked from 2014 to 2020. Now, I had never heard of Turtlenecked before, but this character was apparently pretty successful for Smith. His second EP received a rave review from NPR, and his first EP got a mostly positive Pitchfork review (though they did call his lyrics “insufferable,” which seems to be a common adjective in reviews of both The Dare and Turtlenecked). Turtlenecked’s vibe is wildly different from The Dare’s visually and musically. Turtlenecked’s sound is more indie rock mixed with a little bit of techno and EDM. It has a brighter and less club-focused vibe than The Dare — Smith even had bleached blond hair for the entirety of the project.
In between the dissolution of Turtlenecked and the creation of The Dare, Smith was a substitute teacher at a private NYC high school (until as recent as late 2022!), as well as a guitar teacher for kids, which for anyone who is familiar with The Dare’s vibe, is kind of hilarious. In these gaps between projects, he gained a cult following in NYC for his Freakquencies parties in a local bar, which became so notorious that brands started hiring him out to host afterparties.
During COVID, when the DJ scene wasn’t exactly popping, Smith wrote his now-hit single “Girls.” The song gained some acclaim from publications like The New York Times when it came out in 2022 but didn’t really flourish until this summer. It became a TikTok audio that I think most of us have heard by now, with The Dare iconically declaring, “I like the girls who do drugs / with cigarettes in the back of the club / girls who hate cops and buy guns!”
Personally, I find this song to be really fun and surprisingly inclusive in an endearing way, but I’m not the only Charley who loves this song. After hearing “Girls,” Charli XCX reached out to The Dare, starting off a collaboration that would birth one of the most popular songs of the summer. Before his work on Brat, though, he released a few more EPs, but none of them gained the traction that “Girls” did. I’m also going to chalk some of this traction up to The Dare’s kind of genius marketing. He claimed that Obama liked the song on Spotify, which started a social media storm (I am 99% sure this is how/why I heard “Girls” for the first time). Personally, I can’t find any evidence of Obama talking about this song, but you know what? It’s fun marketing so it gets a pass.
After the success of “Girls”, The Dare was the opener on the preliminary Brat tour and produced “Guess” and its remix with Billie Eilish. Around June-July 2024, when all of this was happening, the persona of The Dare kind of became more mainstream. During Charli XCX’s Brat Boiler Room shows in Ibiza, he was always behind her, as well as in the videos from her birthday party a month later, with his signature suit and sunglasses making him easy to point out. The persona — the suit, the sunglasses — resonated with this indie sleaze aesthetic that had been missing from pop music for a hot second, bringing back a lot of late 2000s-early 2010s nostalgia that people were kind of craving right about now.
In early September of this year, The Dare released his first solo album What’s Wrong With New York? and embarked on a small tour of mostly sold-out shows around the country that became legendary through social media. The album itself is full of songs with ridiculous lyrics and strong beats, making it great club music (though I, and some critics, do find it a little exhausting. It’s fun, it’s just a lot sometimes). Videos from shows reveal an extreme amount of strobe lights. The Dare throws himself around the stage while the crowd consistently seems to go insane over it. I go 50/50 on which of his music I enjoy, but god, those concerts look like so much fun, and bring back a sense of hope in our seemingly messy corporation-dominated live music scene of the moment.
Though it might seem like The Dare lowkey came out of nowhere, it’s actually really nice to see an artist who has been in the scene for so long get his flowers. His commitment to his bit really evokes the persona and fun, a curated vibe of almost a Ziggy Stardust-type figure or even The White Stripes. Bringing back character artists, while also collaborating with one of our most successful and socially relevant artists of the moment, performing sold-out shows, and getting himself ingrained in the cultural conversation in the course of about four months is honestly insanely impressive. His music divides, but I think we all can admit that The Dare is fun, fresh, and someone to keep an eye on.