Partying Is Back, or at Least It Sounds That Way

The success of “brat summer”—Charli XCX’s color-coded rebranding of hedonism whose influence somehow traveled all the way to the presidential campaign—conveyed two lessons about what the masses have yearned for lately. One: People want to have a good time. Two: People want to talk about, think about, and be seen as having a good time … which does raise the question of whether anyone is truly having a good time.

That tension, between authentic pleasure and the performance of pleasure, defines What’s Wrong With New York?, the addictive new album by the much-hyped dance-rock act the Dare. The alias of the 28-year-old musician Harrison Patrick Smith, the Dare is very much aligned with the Brat aesthetic of chain-smoking to electro beats. He even produced Charli XCX’s “Guess,” a song that was hot enough to lure Billie Eilish in for a remix. His music is a blast—and a challenge to the psychological hang-ups of modern partygoers, including himself.

Once a struggling rock poet and DJ, Smith reinvented himself during the pandemic as a suit-and-tie-wearing bon vivant whose shtick is a throwback to prior eras of creative ferment in New York City: the gritty-but-arty 1970s scene, which gave rise to the Talking Heads; the sleazy-cool early 2000s, which were ruled by the Strokes. He started making music whose squelchy synths—combined with his own snotty vocal tone—heavily recalled LCD Soundsystem’s James Murphy, the rock historian who took ecstasy once and then set about giving blog-reading hipsters permission to dance in the 2000s and early 2010s.

Smith is clearly on a similar quest to jolt the squares, reacting to stultifying 2020s social trends: pandemic-exacerbated isolation, internet addiction, post-#MeToo inhibitions around sex. His underground hit, “Girls,” is a Seussian litany of the types of women he’s horny for: “girls who got degrees,” “girls on killin’ sprees,” and so on. “Girls” is built around a two-note riff that bounces and mutates like Flubber, accentuating the song’s silliness. Smith told GQ that the track was “a rejection of the last five years of music,” which he felt had become too gentle, too polite. The song “definitely doesn’t have the agenda of making me look like a really good guy,” he added.

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His transgressive intentions are even more explicit on What’s Wrong With New York?, the Dare’s first full-length album. “You can’t spend your whole life inside,” Smith yowls on the first song, before imploring listeners to open up figuratively and physiologically. “I’m in the club while you’re online,” he taunts on “Good Time.” He delivers these confrontational lyrics in a way that is, objectively, annoying—the sound of someone demanding attention. He is quite clearly rejecting the streaming-era ideal of making music for background listening, and he isn’t worried about being called “cringe,” that shaming buzzword.

The provocations land, mostly due to Smith’s talents as a producer. Structurally, his songs are predictable, accumulating energy and then exploding toward the end—but they’re full of textural surprises worthy of close examination. He bedecks every measure of music in rhythmic hiccups, bright splashes of instrumental color, and giddy backing vocals. Some tracks build to a climax that evokes the thought of war breaking out on the dance floor; other crescendos will make listeners feel like they’re getting sucked into space by a UFO. The spiky, hyper-speed “Movement” is a particular highlight that, in its final moments, achieves the intensity of heavy metal.

Part of the album’s novelty is how old-fashioned it seems. Most modern party music has a whiff of software; you imagine beats arranged on a screen. Smith, however, conjures an image of a mad scientist onstage with a pile of gear tangled in wires. He’s drawing on the same bouquet of sonic references as Murphy—the fidgeting synths of New Order, the scratchy guitars of Gang of Four—but whereas LCD Soundsystem aimed to create epic emotional journeys, Smith’s songs are brief and supersaturated. He’s mining the past in a way that’s suited for the TikTok era, and even the most distracted brain, or the most bed-rotted body, won’t be able to resist reacting.  

In so insistently seeking that reaction, however, the music creates a very contemporary paradox. Smith is self-conscious about trying to shake people out of their self-consciousness; on “Perfume,” he even worries about how his corpse will smell to others when he’s burning in hell. He’s clearly thinking a lot about how he comes off, and like Charli XCX on Brat, he’s excellent at channeling his anxieties into action. But a sense of true abandon, a trancelike loss of identity, never sets in—because he’s constantly checking in, adjusting, goading. I enjoy What’s Wrong With New York?, but I’d hesitate before putting it on in a social situation; it’s too obnoxious for group listening, frankly. The Dare’s legacy may turn out to be oddly functional, propelling people to hit the gym or saunter the streets from the safety of their headphones, enjoying a private party without fear of judgment.