The Dare’s mission is to bring back sleaze and sex, but so far his music has felt mostly like a LARP. The deliciously carnal “Girls” kickstarted Harrison Patrick Smith’s one-man electroclash revival, turning him overnight into a glossy magazine It Boy and a punching bag for critics exhausted by Dimes Square scenesters. But last year’s half-baked Sex EP failed to build on the hype. Now, after a bump in visibility for his production on Charli xcx’s tight and slinky “Guess,” the Dare’s debut album arrives in the form of a musical manifesto. The title, What’s Wrong With New York?, is a rhetorical question. The Dare, with his used-car-salesman blazer, thunderous bass, and horny dance-punk swagger, is here to rescue the city from its sexless pandemic slumber and Make New York Depraved Again.
At 10 tracks, What’s Wrong With New York? doubles the Dare’s catalog while doubling down on everything that’s made his music so queasy. It’s even more redolent of LCD Soundsystem, but with a slimy, trashy edge; imagine James Murphy training as a pick-up artist. It oozes with desperation to sound edgy and cool like NYC rockers of myth. The Dare has spoken about wanting to bring back dissolution, to restore offensive fun to dance-rock. That could thrill if done right, and in certain electrifying moments, the Dare get close. But the album largely hits like a contact high, a simulation of a chaotic night out. It’s like BRAT for fashion consultants who brag about getting listed.
What’s Wrong With New York? is split between typical Dare fare—libido-maxxed hooks, throaty groans—and hackneyed stabs at tender, post-bender profundity. He recycles the two best tracks from his EP, “Girls” and “Good Time,” which hurls voluptuous synth bass and garish hoots into a power surge of tipsy electricity. “Movement” cranks the adrenaline to peak monstrosity, like Fischerspooner’s “Emerge” rewired for body-bashing dancefloor freakouts. Highlight “I Destroyed Disco” is even more unforgiving, evoking Justice distorto-blare. It has some of Smith’s most hubristic lyrics—“I break records, glasses, faces, kick the whole world in the teeth with my untied laces”—but they work because he commits to the bit. Dark bass thuds like depth charge detonations and climaxes in a shockwave of bleeps. File under electro-crash.
Most often, this music conjures only the vague sense that you might’ve heard it before, in a more striking rendition, by a more innovative band. “All Night” has catchy chants but it mostly feels like a lairy, drunken take on early MGMT. The insipid “You’re Invited”—in which he repeats “You’re invited” over a Rapture inspo beat—sounds like the tagline for the app that’s going to disrupt the private event industry. The video for the characterless “Perfume” indeed seems to be a fake commercial, packed with slender models in monochrome.
What’s Wrong With New York? isn’t inventive or texturally weird enough to geek the analog synth heads, and its hooks aren’t massive or sticky enough to work as pure pop either. The embrace of pretentiousness and artifice comes at the expense of real emotional complexity and memorably witty writing. You can sort many of the lyrics into two categories: Gratingly winky come-ons—“I know it might be hard to swallow/But it’s much better once you get a taste” goes an especially repellent one—and sadboy poetry like, “Dreams die like a fantasy/I watch your life crash into me,” which might be more repellent. Songs ostensibly about sex and drunken havoc are devoid of tantalizing details: no coke-addled toilet fucking, no mind-shattering popper rushes, no unadvisable yet irresistible late-night encounters.
What’s most frustrating is how rootless the music feels, like it could’ve been inspired by any city in the past 40 years. Particularly since it’s not like there’s a local or worldwide shortage of raunch right now—just look at the pop charts, or New York’s sexy drill scene. Keeping debauched decadence alive is a sweet idea. But the Dare’s most addictive song is still the one he made in an hour, as an off-the-cuff gag for his friends. His big-tent fantasy of downtown nightlife is one that’s been Xeroxed so many times it’s woefully diluted. What’s wrong with New York? Try a breathless appeal to novelty backed by a creeping sense of déjà vu.
