By Emma Weidmann | Editor-in-Chief
Inside a public school somewhere in America, there is a substitute teacher that will be the next word-slurring, suit-wearing skinny man to haunt New York City’s clubs.
At least, that’s where The Dare — aka Harrsion Smith — crawled out of. It was an unlikely place to find the newest poster boy for sexy, electronic alt-pop, but he’s here and he’s made quite the splash with his debut album, “What’s Wrong With New York?”
Maybe it’s the album’s raunchy, unabashedly shallow and fun aesthetic that propelled its lead singles to TikTok “For-You Pages” everywhere. Maybe it’s his involvement in 2024’s all-consuming “Brat Summer”.
Maybe it’s his “extremely British” looks, as The Guardian quips, that make his music so much like Troye Sivan wearing a Blur costume. Or maybe I’m just chronically online.
Whatever it is that gives this album its allure, “What’s Wrong With New York?” is simultaneously the freshest and the most unoriginal thing I’ve heard in a while. Songs like “You’re Invited” and “Open Up” are genuinely exciting listens, mixing sleazy guitar with a driving, club-geared beat à la Charli XCX.
With lyrics like “what’s a blogger to a rocker? What’s a rocker to The Dare?” the song “I Destroyed Disco” is a breakout hit. It boasts a gritty breakdown that can do nothing but immediately conjure up the image of a sweaty Bushwick club filled with pretentious NYU students out looking for some fun.
And between “Perfume” and “All Night,” the album brings something to a tired music scene that revives it like a shock from a defibrillator.
On the other hand, “Good Time” is so slapstick that it sounds like a parody of itself. There’s a fine line between cheeky and fun and just plain obnoxious. “Good Time” drunkenly stumbles across that line.
The two lonely ballads on the record, “Elevation” and “You Can Never Go Home,” add absolutely nothing. Added to offset the risk of a relentlessly and monotonously upbeat album, these two do little to deepen my impression of who The Dare is, of his range of emotions or his range of songwriting abilities. If the rest of the album is a days-long bender, the ballads are the hangover.
Ultimately, “What’s Wrong With New York?” is an attempt to resuscitate the indie sleaze aesthetic of the 2010s, with all its Black Eyed Peas-ness and Kesha-ousity. The album just doesn’t really exist without the aesthetic from which it borrows its lifeblood or the cultural tour de force that was Charli XCX’s “BRAT.”
Indie sleaze was a direct byproduct of the post-2008 recession years, where clubbing — its music and aesthetics — provided an escape from harsh financial realities. You can’t just bring an aesthetic back just because you wish you were 21 when it happened. It has to come about organically, and once it’s dead, it’s dead for good.
The Dare was born out of a corner of Gen Z TikTok that steals aesthetics from the past in search of its own identity. A few months ago, some trendy people declared that indie sleaze was back. Enter The Dare, poised to cater to this exact microcosm of the internet and serendipitously linked to the hottest artist of the summer — merely in the right place at the right time.
