Can one man revive an entire genre? Well, that’s what they’ve been whispering about Harrison Patrick Smith, aka The Dare. The electroclash musician is best known for his work with Charli xcx on her underwear themed earworm Guess (later remixed to include Billie Eilish, taking it from a standard hit to an unavoidable phenomenon).
His own music has a similar style: raunchy lyrics, straightforward prose and earth shattering bass drops. He’s been tipped as the reviver of indie sleaze, the subculture associated with indie music from 2006 to 2012. It’s a heavy crown to wear. The last indie sleaze monarch was Pete Doherty, if that puts it into perspective.
But last night, at Camden’s Electric Ballroom, Smith proved that he may be capable of carrying the weight. Arriving on stage in his trademark black and white suit (he is rarely seen in anything else), light flooded the crowd as Smith shouted the lyrics to “Open Up”. The crowd jostled and jumped, an array of hands almost constantly elevated to get their worth of footage for socials (he’s very beloved on TikTok).
From here, Smith took revellers on a whistlestop tour of his debut (and only) album, What’s Wrong with New York? The phones disappeared at times in place of upthrown hands during big bass drops, like that of I Destroyed Disco and Perfume.
During the latter, Smith fell to his knees and gyrated on the stage, a small but outrageous bit of performing that drove the crowd wild. Many of the fans were so obsessed with him that he didn’t need to do much more than raise the microphone to the sky in order to get a resounding scream from the audience – and he did.
A newbie to The Dare might have complained that it all sounded the same, but that’s what the people were there for. Smith has a distinctive sound and an album of songs in a format that his fans adore. Saying that, if one of his songs isn’t your thing, the rest probably won’t be either.
Smith took a break from singing at one point to play Bloodwork, a more electronic, lyricless song from his oeuvre, which added to the feeling of it being more of a club night than a gig. Sadly, due to said oeuvre still being relatively small and Smith doing barely any crowd interaction, he raced through the songs in what felt like quite rapid succession, leaving the audience hanging.
The final song was, of course, Girls, The Dare’s first ever single, which was ranked as the 5th best song of 2022 by The New York Times. It’s a thoroughly modern day reenvisioning of The Rolling Stones’s Some Girls, with shades of Calvin Harris’s I Get All The Girls, chronicling all of The Dare’s favourite women. “I like the girls that do drugs (Drugs), Girls with cigarettes in the back of the club (Club)” … “Girls with dicks, Call girls, Girls that get naked on the ‘gram.”
The venue exploded with glee, only to come crashing back down to earth when the song finished. No build up and no extended outro: Smith wrapped things up in a businesslike manner and called it a night.
A shame. As the audience filtered out, it felt as if everyone could have gone another couple of rounds. The Dare’s still got a long way to come before we know if he’s able to singlehandedly revive indie sleaze. But he definitely left the people of Camden wanting more.
On tour. More information at itsthedare.com. Concert photography courtesy Nicole Orsin @nicoleosrin
