The Dare

Harrison Patrick Smith was born in West Hollywood in 1996, grew up around Seattle, where at a young age he took up studying guitar and violin, moved to Portland for college, majoring in English literature, and finally relocated to Williamsburg, the trendy Brooklyn neighbourhood where countless artists live. Los Angeles, Seattle, Portland, New York. If you have talent and you breathe in the atmosphere of these cities, you can soak up plenty of input and get in touch with the people who matter: it's in these places that things happen. At a certain point Harrison founded Turtlenecked, a college band that stayed stuck in the American indie-rock underground despite more than five years of steady releases. Then the pandemic came along and brought everything to a halt for quite a while, and in 2022 Smith decided to wipe the slate clean and start over in complete solitude with a project to which he gave the name The Dare. Smith is extremely good at getting himself into the right situations, and he's also good-looking, a perfect combination for being regularly booked to liven up the exclusive after-parties following Gucci and Yves Saint Laurent shows with his DJ sets.

On these occasions it's not hard to run into people with whom to put together interesting projects, and when in August 2022 The Dare released "Girls", the first single from his new artistic creation (followed the next year by "The Sex Ep"),Charli XCXwas so struck by that sound that she insisted on having him as producer - two years later - for "Guess", the duet withBillie Eilishthat would grace the definitive edition of "Brat". The man behind The Dare project found himself, at this point, at the centre of attention: he's even on stage alongside Charli in the English popstar's iconic performance during theGrammy Awards 2025awards ceremony. Meanwhile, in September 2024, Smith released the first album under the name The Dare, "What’s Wrong With New York?", which started slowly but managed to become a long-term seller, buoyed by its creator's growing fame. On the promotional tour that followed, Harrison didn't perform as the leader of a band (as the album might lead you to imagine) but inone-man-show, singing over pre-recorded backing tracks, with him just operating a couple of small keyboards. The Dare also appears on the 2025 lineups of some of the most prestigious international music festivals: Coachella, Primavera Sound, Lollapalooza, Reading + Leeds.

“What’s Wrong With New York?” establishes itself as a party record built on dance-punk sounds, an album that observes from a distance the formula LCD Soundsystem (“All Night”) in order to apply it to the “danceable post-punk” model pursued in recent months by numerous British acts, such as Yard Act and Fat Dog. Over EDM backing tracks built with catchy grooves underpinned by deep basslines (“You’re Invited”), The Dare grafts on some electric guitar and further references to new-wave (“Elevation”), big beat (“Movement”), electroclash (“I Destroyed Disco”) and the britpop side of Pulp (“You Can Never Go Home”). But the tracks worth jotting down in your notebook, besides the already well-known “Girls”, the ones that seem the most successful, are “Perfume” and “Open Up”. In 2025 “What’s Wrong With New York?” comes back into the spotlight with the announcement of an expanded edition released on June 13th, enriched with three bonus tracks, including the single “LCA”, in line with the mood of the ten already-released songs, and a cover of “I Can’t Escape Myself” by Sound.

At the end of August 2025, just a few weeks after the release of the deluxe edition of "What's Wrong With New York?", The Dare returns with a new EP that shifts the stylistic axis of his music decisively towards EDM. "Frequencies" is only the first volume of a series of releases inspired by the same-named club night series run by the young American musician/producer. Initially headquartered in New York, at Manhattan's Home Sweet Home, the project soon became an export phenomenon, racking up numerous sellouts across North America and Europe. "Freakquencies" is therefore an idea engineered to get people dancing, to bring people together, and listening to the four instrumental tracks (my favourite is "Kick", the one with the most "Chemical Brothers"-like sound), lively and compelling as they are, feels like putting your hand right on the city's pulse, the intense electricity of the night, all distilled into an electronic sound with indie-sleaze traits, leaving aside any post-punk, britpop or wave interference, interference that was well represented on last year's album. The space is instead entirely occupied by an acid form of big beat, by a house explosion that seems to want to represent a nostalgic journey back into the small-club scene of the 2000s. You can feel the vibe of packed dancefloors, the sweat of bodies brushing against each other, the meticulous work of whichever DJ is on duty, and ringing out clearly in the air is The Dare's invitation to kids all over the world: go back to the clubs to have fun instead of staying in your bedroom, pretending to socialise in front of your smartphones. (Claudio Lancia)