What’s wrong with New York? Skinny sexed-up white men in two pieces, maybe.

If at this point in my tenure at Leeds I was having sex with a man and “Espresso” by Sabrina Carpenter came on shuffle, I think a harbinging shiver would pass through me and then my arsehole would instantaneously clamp shut and dismember him. Guillotine (viva la France). And as feminist(-adjacent) as the imagined image of that may be (see: Lorena Bobbitt), it would be messy and problematic and what if my arsehole, like the head of a snapping turtle or venus flytrap, never opened again? What then? How would I poo? Pressing questions like these keep me up at night, and move me to make use of the omniscient, disembodied voice of Real Journalism to investigate, interrogate, and ultimately protect. Dirty music is important! More so than clean music, in the same way that meal prep is not as important as PrEP pills. It sets you free.

Enter The Dare. Hot on the heels of his 2023 The Sex EP, we have been bestowed with his debut LP What’s Wrong With New York? (2024). Picture an anaemic twink in a trademark suit which says fun.’s “We Are Young” (2012), but hides under all that polyester something darker. Darker, how? Let’s ask the audience:

1. Darker: as in a loose-belted, more meta iteration of the brash and fleeting electroclash genre that snake-charmed listeners around 2010 before being gobbled up by twee, banjo-thrumming pasture-synth à la Birdy and Foxes, never to be seen again.
2. Darker: in colour. As in dark eyebags pigmented by the gaunt absence of post-2007 recession optimism and the obliteration of the UED (Universal Electropop Dancefloor) resulting in an irreconcilable polarity between tedious house ballads made too neurotic by the digital panopticon to just dance and camera-ban queer raves beleaguered by happy hardcore, wubby trance, GHB, and fisting. 
3. Darker: he says if we try to stop him he’s gonna “fuck a hole in the wall”. Everyone hide.

Now what if I told you that the answer (DING!DING!DING!) was all of the above?! Armed with a vicious, breakneck arsenal of bass synths and a similarly breakneck libido, The Dare has managed to weasel his way between some of the alt pop vanguard’s most coveted acts. After landing fan favourite bonus track “Guess” as the only feature on Charli XCX’s party girl magnum opus BRAT (2024), he gave us a distinct and dirty taste of his mixing on July 13th at Charli’s Ibiza Boiler Room, showcasing a jawdropper (literally – see: 1:31:46 of the set on YouTube) of a “Mean Girls” remix to close out the night. Since then, he’s scored interviews with The New York Times  and GQ, a spot in the “Guess” music video next to Billie Eilish, and a horned-up cult of fans ready to indulge in the tongue-in-cheek rockstar-groupie charade that The Dare’s discography shoots through the aux.

His debut fulfils many of the expectations his first EP created. Carnal, club-ready, and cunt, it’s an identity record in every way, sticking to a trademarkable soundscape and hinging on “I” phrasing. Mr. Dare, what do you like? “Tall girls, short girls, girls with dicks, call girls.” Mr. Dare, what do you do? “Write the lyrics, bring the spirit, hear demos, make babies.” His vision is clear, and his vision is one constructed by scavenging off the bones of a Kesha-and-Justice-fueled late 00s dancefloor and building them into a speaker-blowing, slurring, sexy, suit-wearing Frankenproducer custom-made for the zeitgeist of today.

Now, I won’t sit here and hail this album as a groundbreaking ode to sex. It’s impossible to deny that we’re experiencing a erotic pop renaissance, between the likes of brat, The Rise and Fall of a Midwestern Princess (2023), and Short n’ Sweet (2024). I suppose what sticks out about What’s Wrong With New York? is its blatant eagerness to fill a role which has almost diminished into oblivion this decade. The Dare is a fittingly meta resurrection of the obnoxious, prodigal pop maestro that was once called Calvin Harris, or Passion Pit, or Caribou, or MGMT. He has taken the esoteric anonymity of the “man behind the music” that characterised the sweaty electropop producer of the late 00s and early 10s and turned it into a sort of sardonic drag uniform. Generic dark sunglasses and a two-piece suit embrace an emblematic bravado to match the bawdiness of the record, which kicks off with the testing lyric “it’s just rock n’ roll, you won’t die” on “Open Up”. 

From there we fly into a barrage of consistently filthy club bangers such as the pitch-shifted “I Destroyed Disco” and the bouncy, wind-tunnel track “Movement”.  “Elevation”, a standout and a shift in tone, pulls on the atmospheric late-night-wistfulness of the likes of Coldplay whilst staying firmly within the confines of the New York that The Dare paints for us. The LP closes up with the slower but satisfyingly grand “You Can Never Go Home” that ends the album smoothly whilst not alienating itself from standalone listenability. 

This is without doubt a record constructed with substantial direction, a clear target audience, and tactful production. If it falls short, it’s because the listener gets a sense that The Dare is so confident in his (undeniably smart) vision for his brand that he hesitates to step beyond its confines. Such a bawdily creative debut EP alludes to an even more flamboyant and unexpected debut record rollout, and whilst it makes for a comprehensive consolidation of The Dare’s identity as an artist, it fails to renew his reputation as an artistically recalcitrant enfant terrible of the pop scene. If the two tracks taken from The Sex EP were cut from the project and replaced with two riskier choices that fit more uncomfortably with the rest of the tracklist, the album might better uphold the skanky caricature The Dare is building of himself. Despite this, What’s Wrong With New York? constitutes itself as sex-fuelled dance record that finds value in the trifle of at once sounding like an LP that a three-person, suspender-wearing act fresh out of Goldsmith’s would peak at #8 with in 2009, falsely insinuating Mr. Dare is, in fact, a New Yorker, and actually making us move.

So, what is wrong with New York? Who am I to answer? The comparisons are many. Calvin Harris, Caribou, Justice, Joy Division, Gorillaz, LCD Soundsystem, and, if I dare say, even Peaches have bled into Comrade Dare’s work, and the People have not been deaf to this. The sky is falling, Big Brother is watching, the squalid city streets of Twitter have their opinions, and certain individuals who I’m sure are very busy are unhappy with The Dare’s iteration of Inexplicably Prodigal Kooky Sexed-Up Skinny White Man Music. But even if we put aside the fact that every rotation of this trend is leaps and bounds more creative than the bedroom pop epidemic, the trendiness of moxy-heavy Hedon-worshipper lyrics, and the blindingly obvious fact that The Dare’s entire identity as an artist belies a campy revival of “indie sleaze”, What’s Wrong With New York? proves Harrison Smith as a producer with a dab hand for mixing, a finger on the pulse of the culture, and another in… someone, somewhere, I guess.