One Tuesday evening in September, in an unassuming, dusty building in New York’s Chinatown and up a rickety elevator ride that made you wonder about the pre-war building’s safety codes, you’d find the Dare DJing on the sixth floor to a few dozen people, days before he heads out on a sold-out tour across the United States. Truthfully, he prefers it this way.
“Small shows are just always better,” the Dare says. It’s not a unique sentiment, but it’s one that encapsulates the energy that the star born Harrison Patrick Smith has brought to downtown Manhattan, and as of this fall, across the United States. “The really big shows are fun and they feel epic but mostly people just stand around,” he adds. “I like the small-room club energy.”
When we speak a few hours before the invite-only festivities, Smith is calm and relaxed — his default demeanor when he’s not raucously raging and performing his dance-punk songs that have taken over the if-you-know-you-know crowd. His viral hit “Girls” has Smith proclaiming his love for the exact type of girl who might be posted up at one of his shows: “do drugs,” check, “cigarettes in the back,” check, “mean just for fun,” check. The scene-y anthem rocketed the now 28-year-old into the middle of a label bidding war and led to his debut album, What’s Wrong With New York?, out now.
After starting and quitting violin at the age of four, and getting some live experience under his belt with a high school band, Smith moved from the West Coast to New York in 2018. A few random jobs later, he landed a substitute teaching gig at a private school in Manhattan’s West Village. When he wasn’t in a classroom, he was DJing at Lower East Side haunt Home Sweet Home, where he started out doing Monday nights. (He eventually got promoted to Thursdays after someone quit.)
“My old boss at one of the restaurants that I worked at just found out what was going on today,” Smith says. “[He was like] ‘I can’t believe you were, like, slicing cheese.’”
The Dare is often seen in a slick black suit, one that’s become part fun bit, part marketing plot, as folks watching Boiler Room sets online ask, “Who’s the guy in the suit?” Years ago, Smith walked into New York thrift store Beacon’s Closet and purchased a blazer that would go on to inspire his uniform today. “I remember playing around with a few different looks, but it just felt very fun and cool to wear the suit and then I just sort of started wearing it all the time,” he says.
Back at the party on the sixth floor, a cooler of Bud Light beer cans sits on the floor near the entrance, a disco ball hangs motionless in one corner, and much of the light comes from the glow of the downtown Manhattan skyline outside giant windows. There’s not much of a stage — just an area that implies where the performer should stand.
As the Dare’s set goes on, you get the sense that he’s looking to blur the boundaries between performer and audience. As he sings “Girls,” Harrison is climbing on window sills and then flinging himself at the crowd. On TikTok, a clip showing him leaning over the crowd has garnered more than 700,000 views. Some commenters are unconvinced that the crowd is matching Harrison’s freak: One comment reads “my turn, they’re not fun.” Another says, “They don’t get him like I do.”
“I just like the play and the freedom that music and performance allows you,” he says. “I just kind of crank it up to ten and say whatever I want.”
So if these folks weren’t the ones who should be tapped into the Dare, who is? How did they get hip to the artist who was once the Lower East Side’s best-kept secret? Adidas sponsored his release week pop-up. There are TikTok thinkpieces about how he’s going mainstream. None of this seems to faze the star who’s uninterested in running away from the spotlight.
“I have no allergy to success or ambition,” he says. “I want to make the most interesting, beautiful music on the largest scale possible. If that happens, that will be wonderful… I’m just happy that people like it.”
Even the old hangouts are changing. Harrison still (rightfully) has a lot of love for Clandestino, a cozy bar on Canal Street, but he wouldn’t consider himself an avid frequenter of Dimes Square anymore.
“Now it’s this whole enterprise that’s not exactly my people or people that I want to hang out with,” he says. “It’s a little bit different. There’s still amazing things about it. It’s more normie. It’s more yuppie. I don’t know. It’s fine.”
On What’s Wrong With New York?, the Dare introduces himself to a wider audience through 10 tracks with no features. That was a choice he made, despite his stacked Rolodex, in order to establish his own voice. He teases that his second project “will have a lot more features and collaborations.”
On the braggadocious album cut “I Destroyed Disco,” The Dare flexes his influence and exploits over a pulsating instrumental. There’s everything you expect from one of his songs, including quotables that itch that part of your brain just right. “What’s a blogger to a rocker, what’s a rocker to The Dare?” he sings on the song’s second verse. The track, which Harrison produced with Dylan Brady of 100 gecs and which he calls one of the album’s most abrasive, elicits a strong reaction when played live.
“I think songs need to have moments that are immediate, that immediately surprise you or hook you in or make you laugh. But it also needs to have sort of a deeper, abstract appeal that’ll make you want to relisten to it,” Smith says. “It’s like telling jokes. If there’s a joke in the song, the whole song can’t survive off one joke. Like if you heard it once, it’s not going to get funnier every time you hear it.”
During our conversation, the Dare brings up the idea of worldbuilding a couple times, but he doesn’t see a huge difference between his character and Harrison. He sees his persona as an exaggerated version of himself that he can toggle back and forth with. In a way, it sounds reminiscent of what his frequent collaborator Charli XCX has done this year.
“She’s the best singer ever,” he says, pulling out an arty comparison to the painter Mark Rothko. “I feel like you might not know it because of the Auto-Tune and because she uses her voice in such a masterful way. She uses Auto-Tune as an instrument, straddling notes or something in this really beautiful way.”
The Dare got even more exposure this summer when he produced Charli XCX’s Brat bonus track “Guess,” which later received a Billie Eilish remix and a viral music video. The lyrics are cheeky, the delivery is deadpan, and you can feel the Dare’s imprint on the track without checking the credits.
The “Guess” remix has nearly 160 million listens on Spotify and is the second-most streamed song from Brat album. The track almost never saw the light of day
“Neither of us were crazy about it,” Smith says about an early iteration of the song that lay unfinished for a year; the pair revisited it earlier this year. On May 2, Charli XCX was in New York for the Met Gala and the Dare was hosting one of his parties at Le Bain, promising very special guests. He didn’t disappoint: Kesha came through to party and Charli went from singing “360” on top of a black SUV in Brooklyn to Le Bain’s DJ booth with Smith. Once there, he played a very different version of the song that was originally called “Underwear.”
“I was like, ‘Maybe I’ll make a remix or something of it for fun,’” he says. “I basically sped it way up. I remade the instrumental which was way more like electro, house, and electroclash-influenced.” Charli loved it.
After the party, they had a mad dash to finish the song so that it could land on Charli’s deluxe version of Brat. Charli cut new vocals, while Smith focused on making tweaks to the future hit. “She was cutting the vocals in the studio and I was just sitting there with my headphones on, still adding a bunch of elements, even like the warbly synth at the end,” he says. “[Charli’s] like, ‘Are you even listening to what I’m saying over here?’ And I’m like, ‘No. I’m sure it’s good though.’”
Now a lot more people know who the Dare is than those who went to see him spin at the now defunct Bowery Union on Broome Street. For now, the Dare is embracing the newfound attention. He speaks like someone with a plan to only get bigger — Charli co-signs that notion, recently telling The New York Times that he’ll be “one of the next big pop producers” in the next five years.
The Dare looks down and flashes a smile when I mention his friend’s compliment: “I’m trying to create something that’s more long-lasting than a super quick hit of dopamine.”
