“Send it to The Dare, yeah I think he’s with it”: The Hauntology of Indie Sleaze, Brat Summer, and The Dare

Special Issue and Review of The Dare's "What's Wrong with New York?"

The Dare—What’s Wrong With New York?
Released September 6, 2024

“Indie Sleaze is Back!” “Indie Sleaze was never real!” “Brat summer” this, “Brat summer” that!” Voices saying all of these things have been swirling around in my head for the better part of two years. And at the center of all this discourse is The Dare, a 28 year old former substitute teacher turned DJ who first caught widespread attention with his raunchy single “Girls” and who has blown up even bigger this summer thanks to his collaboration with Charli XCX on her track “Guess.” The Dare, which is the stage name of artist Harrison Patrick Smith, with his skinny tie, sunglasses, and electroclash dance punk style, is (allegedly) the second coming of Indie Sleaze (whatever that means) and people have a lot of feelings about it.

Like there is around the whole concept of Indie Sleaze, the reactions to The Dare are polarizing. There are some who heard his songs on TikTok, and as brat summer is reaching its natural conclusion, are looking for something to keep the party going, while there are others who see The Dare as nothing more than a cheap, inauthentic “poor mimicry” of bands like LCD Soundsystem and CAKE.

As always when there’s an album that’s getting a lot of attention, I like to sit back, take my time, and try to get to the bottom of how I feel about it, after I try to block out what everyone else has had to say. But now I’m finally ready to unpack my thoughts on The Dare and his debut album, What’s Wrong with New York?

First up on the agenda to discuss is what the hell even is Indie Sleaze? After a maddening few days of research and reading every thinkpiece and listicle I could find, I’m still not quite sure and I’m not convinced that anyone else knows either. Initially it was coined to describe an era where “skinny jeans (suffocatingly tight) paired with leather jackets and striped shirts and vests—maybe even a little cheesy fedora,” “smudged makeup that you didn’t worry about (the messier, the better),” and deep V neck shirts were the fashion and bands like The Strokes, Yeah Yeah Yeahs, LCD Soundsystem, Interpol, MGMT, and Arctic Monkeys were heard on the radio. Of the 20+ plus articles I read, the rough timeframe for the original Indie Sleaze heyday was roughly from 2001 to 2012, with some articles specifically highlighting the years 2006, 2007, or 2008 as its start, 2009-2010 as its peak, and its eventual death between 2010 and 2012. The term “Indie Sleaze” was coined by internet trend forecasters in late 2021, and ever since there’s been a debate whether the era they were describing as “coming back” ever really existed in the first place. Some take issue with the wording, saying that they never called it that at the time and the name is a modern invention being retrofitted onto a romanticized bygone era. But my issue with the idea of Indie Sleaze, and particularly with the notion that The Dare is supposed to be the poster child for it, is that I think we’re talking about two different eras entirely.

Now, I say all of this with the caveat that during the years in question, I was roughly 2 to 13 years old, meaning I was much too young to have been in Brooklyn, been in the clubs, been anywhere near having first-hand knowledge of this time. But, I will say that as a young teenager on the internet in the waning days of “Indie Sleaze,” I remember looking at some of these styles with the same wide-eyed fascination that a younger sibling might have watching their older sister get ready to go out. In some ways, I remember what the 2012-2013 style era specifically looked like because there was a time where that was all I wanted to be.

That said, I think we’re playing a little fast and loose with what we’re deeming “Indie Sleaze.” What I’m considering as “Indie Sleaze” is the 2009-2013 hipster era that included sub-categories of twee and scene. I’m thinking of the era where people were getting mustaches tattooed on their fingers, they were talking about artisanal beer and Brooklyn was in the process of, but not yet gentrified. The bands of the time were Arctic Monkeys, The XX, and MGMT, all the bands whose album covers I would soon see in aesthetic black and white photos on Tumblr when I joined the platform in late 2012. That’s what I consider Indie Sleaze, and by that consideration, I don’t think The Dare is Indie Sleaze. Rather what The Dare is emulating is the time in New York City that’s been called the “Rebirth of Rock and Roll,” “post-punk revival” and “garage band revival,” but I mostly call it The Strokes era.

Almost all of my knowledge of what I’m deeming The Strokes era, which I would put the time frame between 2001 and 2009, right around 9/11 to right around the 2008 recession, comes from Lizzy Goodman’s 2017 book Meet Me in The Bathroom. This book, and its subsequent documentary, follows the rise of bands like The Strokes, but also LCD Soundsystem, Yeah Yeah Yeahs, Interpol, White Stripes, and more as they navigated the New York music scene largely before and during the rise of the internet and music blog culture. Around this same time frame as The Strokes and Interpol, there was also acts like Fischerspooner and DJs like Justine D and The Misshapes which is where I see The Dare getting the majority of his inspiration. His sound has been described as “00s hedonism” and which Smith himself says is “dance-punk, electroclash, and bloghouse,” inspired.

The Dare’s particular brand of aughts dance-punk music got a boost in August of this year when a track he produced with Charli XCX and featuring Billie Eilish titled “Guess” was dropped ahead of Brat and it’s completely different but also still brat, the highly anticipated and expanded collaborations version of Charli’s hit album. You’d have to have lived under a rock for the last six months to be unfamiliar with brat and it’s mega impact, with everyone from brands to presidential candidates adopting the recognizable green that’s become synonymous with the album.

Because of the widespread success of brat as well as the rise of Indie Sleaze discourse, The Dare has been accused of being manufactured to fit this particular moment’s obsession, with a writer from GQ questioning if his “shtick was tailored to fill the indie sleaze revival’s void of actual artists.” However, The Dare has been playing weekly shows in New York called Freakquencies and started releasing songs, including “Girls” as early as May 2023, which is a year before everyone starting calling themselves and everything brat. So despite what you might think, this is not a reactionary album created to emulate the success of brat summer, but rather it’s two artists who share similar pre-social media era clubbing culture inspirations.

Instead of The Dare being an industry plant aimed at capturing a certain taste in the market, it’s actually a rather meticulously curated persona built by Smith. He is oft-seen in a full suit, which has been said to “evoke the British Invasion” but also emulates the suited up style of post-punk revival bands like the Strokes, Franz Ferdinand, and Interpol who dressed in business-like suits to perform. He said of his decision to create a persona that can exist outside of who Smith is on a day to day basis, “‘All of my musical heroes typically commit to the bit, and…The bit…furthers the story of the music, or piques the interest or the imagination of the listener even more.” Smith then references an artist well known for their personas, David Bowie, “‘If he was just wearing a T-shirt and jeans, would he be David Bowie? And would you even like the music as much?… If there wasn’t that lore around the music, would you even like any of it?’”  I think it’s really interesting that he specifically said the word lore, as there’s already been much discussion this year, particularly surrounding Taylor Swift and her album The Tortured Poets Department, which divided fans and sparked debate about how much lore is too much lore. But in Smith’s case, he’s intentionally trying to create mystique and a conversation, which maybe says something about how lore can be used in a way that adds to the overall project, but doesn’t distract. Even with the suit creating a distinction between himself and The Dare, Smith insists “the Dare is not a persona per se,…There are elements that are real and there are elements that are supersized. It’s definitely an expression of my id, but the id is still within me. It’s not something I just made up. I find it a lot more interesting in music when the line between fiction and reality is blurred.” And just like his musical heroes, Smith commits to the bit, even opening a performance art installation in New York City, where for thirty-six hours, “attendees could preview Smith’s unreleased music, fondle props from his videos, purchase his friends’ wares (smash burgers, fifty-five-dollar decorative keys), and talk to the man himself.” Reading about the installation, with it’s exclusivity (participants were removed after so many hours to allow for the next wave to enter) and its obvious cash-grabbiness, I feared that The Dare was just another grift. But after reading a bit more, now I’m not so sure. Aside from Smith the artist being described in person as “soft-spoken, well-mannered, bordering on bashful,” it’s not like his entire act was cooked up by a label to capitalize on the “Indie Sleaze” or early aughts nostalgia. Before his EP was released in May 2023, when Smith tried to court label attention, “nobody really cared about putting it out, [but] when I did put it out, it sort of snowballed, real organic growth.” So it does seem like it happened organically and because there is a genuine interest in this sound, whether that interest is because it’s currently trendy or for other reasons, we’ll investigate that a bit later. But if this was meant to be a flash in the pan, take the money and run kind of thing, I don’t think Smith would be discussing his longevity. He specifically says in a Rolling Stone feature, “I’m trying to create something that’s more long-lasting than a super quick hit of dopamine.” And while he has already said his second album “will have a lot more features and collaborations,” he deliberately chose on this project to include no features, just him, “in order to establish his own voice.” He might be the trendiest act now, but none of that strikes me as an act that’s only here for a good time, not a long time. I think he might actually have more tricks up his sleeve.

Moving on to the album itself, there have been critiques that it sounds a bit same-y, but that doesn’t bother me so much. To me, this is a concept record and the concept is the reuse and recycling of the New York aughts sound. Sure, “Girls” has a similar riff to CAKE’s “Short Skirt / Long Jacket” while Smith’s vocal performance on “You’re Invited” sounds like Damon Albarn and on “Movement” like Julian Casablancas. As far as the comparisons to LCD Soundsystem, and more specifically to “All My Friends,” which allegedly sounds like “All Night,”  I don’t think they sound alike at all. Personally I think a lot of the specific comparisons to LCD Soundsystem are generic, recycled critiques that someone saw in a tweet and decided to parrot that same criticism. Personally, I don’t think it’s a critique based in what we can actually hear, when I play the two songs, I’m not hearing any similarities, whereas I can definitely hear the similarity between “Girls” and “Short Skirt/ Long Jacket.”

Something I find myself increasingly drawn to is rhythm and cadence, which is what makes songs like “Girls” and “All Night” so addictive to me. My favorite track on the album is “Elevation,” a sweet moment of vulnerability on an album full of rudeness, grit, and debauchery. The beginning instrumental also reminded me of the twinkling beginning of SOPHIE’s “It’s Okay to Cry.” SOPHIE, of course being a pioneer in this modern era of production and influenced artists like Charli XCX, Caroline Polachek, and others, so it makes sense for The Dare, whose work is so much about the production, to be influenced by her as well. Other songs like “Perfume,” “I Destroyed Disco,” and “You Can Never Go Home” are fun, but I can understand critiques that the album “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 writing is also more so about building up the persona of The Dare, but there’s not much that’s particularly revealing, vulnerable, or that tells much of a story. What one reviewer called a lack of “real emotional complexity,” or “devoid of tantalizing details,” I think is more that vibe was prioritized over lyrical writing. Even if Smith had leaned even more into the persona he’s trying to build and wrote entirely about insane nights-out that may or may not have really happened, I think it would have given us more to talk about lyrically but with what we have, all we can really talk about is the production and the persona.

What initially drew me into listening to The Dare was not necessarily the music itself, but the negative reaction to it. So many comments under TikTok videos were all the same, calling him a ripoff of LCD Soundsystem, CAKE, or early MGMT and saying they don’t understand why anyone would like The Dare because he’s “objectively a derivative of their sound.”

When negative comments boil down to “They’re not that good, they’re just [insert legacy band from 20+ years ago],” it really grinds my gears. It’s a boring critique because it ignores the fact that no art, much less music, is made in a vacuum. We all grow up listening to some kind of music, whether that be music our parents listened to or that we found on our own as we grew up, so no musician is without a wide catalog of music they love influencing their decisions as they make music now. As you know, I am not afraid to make comparisons between artists newer and older, but whenever the main criticism of an artist is that they’re “ripping off” another artist from 20 years prior, my response is always “Okay, and who cares?” I don’t say any of this in a way that’s meant to be dismissive or flippant about the way some artists are obviously following in the jet stream of another artist’s winning formula, although I suppose you could argue that The Dare is doing exactly that, but I think that argument would be moot because of the culture cycle.

The culture cycle is the idea that every twenty years, there’s a nostalgic revival of the pop culture from two decades prior. In this case, in 2024, that would be the pop culture of 2004. For those who were participants in the culture of 2004, this resurgence might feel like a inauthentic attempt to capture what they experienced during their youth, but for younger generations, this is a chance to relive an era they were either too young to participate in, but have only seen in photos and archives, or that they’re just now being exposed to. If you lived through the initial trend, I can understand how you might think this new revival “isn’t exciting or groundbreaking,” but can you also maybe understand that, for younger generations who have access to all of recorded history’s worth of music and might not be familiar with LCD Soundsystem or CAKE, might think this is groundbreaking or exciting to them?

And for those specifically irritated about the Indie Sleaze of it all with The Dare, I’m willing to concede that the term is new, but the desire for a revival is not. It’s actually not surprising in the slightest, but rather it’s right on time. Like Dustin Payseur of the Beach Fossils said in an interview with GQ, “It’s the 20 year cycle of the downtown scene: 1980s New York with Liquid Liquid, 2000s New York with The Rapture, 2020s New York with The Dare.” And it’s not like the bands of the 2000s like LCD Soundsystem or The Strokes were necessarily reinventing the wheel either. Bands of that era were borrowing in part from 80s post-punk, which itself borrows in essence from 60s garage bands, and electronic music from the 80s and 90s which itself owes a huge debt to the work of Brian Eno. Daniel Lopatin, a electronic music producer, has spoken about his speculation that music has “shifted from ‘its Renaissance period of recording’ (i.e. the last hundred years) and [is] entering a period ‘evaluation’ and reprocessing. ‘If music is recessing into some kind of archival period, I don’t think it’s bad. It’s just natural.”¹ So if this borrowing of sounds and inspiration from the past is a natural one, then there’s no conspiracy, there’s no record execs thinking they’re pulling something on you by releasing old Strokes demos, it’s a genuine returning to a twenty-year-old sound just like every single revival that’s come before. Smith makes no secret that he was influenced by the New York City rock revival scene in the aughts, the entire album is telling you, no it’s shouting at you, that those are the influences, those are the references. And maybe one song out of those ten sounds like LCD Soundsystem, another one sounds like CAKE, and another one sounds like Damon Albarn. If you really love LCD Soundsystem and you hate The Dare, then you’re in luck because the existence of The Dare in no way negates your ability to still listen to LCD Soundsystem and in fact, no new artists’ existence takes away your ability to still listen to the bands that you love that they may or may not take influence from. And if you really love LCD Soundsystem, or CAKE, shouldn’t you be ecstatic that there’s now more music that sounds like them?

But don’t just take my word for it about the culture cycle. There’s long been discussions of the idea that nostalgia has been baked into the popular culture of the last fifteen to twenty years and it’s that nostalgia that has been stifling the creating of new, original movements in music, fashion, and pop culture at large. The idea is called Retromania and the author of the book on Retromania, Simon Reynolds, makes a comparison between what we’re seeing in music and what we’ve been seeing in fashion.

We know thrifting and vintage fashion has been popular amongst Gen Z. What people used to do to find unique clothes on a budget has become a major trend. A lot of the reasons people give for why they thrift or shop secondhand is because of the environmental element, by shopping vintage, we’re saving clothes from ending up in landfills and giving them second life. On the flip side of thrifting, we’ve seen wider spread criticism and condemnation of overconsumption. The days of giant online ordering hauls are coming to a close. Not only are large hauls irresponsible financially, but also environmentally, with shipping, and ethically, because stores that can sell cheaply made clothes for cheap prices can do so because they rely on child labor. A large reason for people participating in these large hauls is the ever-quickening trend cycle for style, and a lot of that has been blamed on algorithmic social media platforms like TikTok. On TikTok, every week is a new must-have aesthetic, from clean girl to mob wife to frazzled English woman, the shifting from trend to trend never ends. This neverending trend shift tied in with FOMO leads to many feeling like they need a whole new wardrobe every few weeks to keep up with the newest trends, tossing perfectly good garments away into landfills or worse, just thrown to the back of the closet never to be worn again. Reynolds likens this fashion trend cycle, with fashion being a “machinery for creating cultural capital” that with “incredible speed, strip[s] it of value and dump[s] the stock” and this process that fashion has started “permeates everything,”² including music. When people lament the fact that new acts are “ripping off” older acts, what they’re really saying is they want new, innovative, never-heard-before sounds, but the truth is that’s just not reality. Like with fashion, we must reuse and recycle what has come before so as to not devalue what we already have.

All of the reviews, features, and interviews with or about The Dare share this mystified, “Why this guy? Why now?” attitude and frankly, I’m confused by their confusion. In addition to the culture cycle, could there be another reason, perhaps something in the last 5 years that changed what the world and the future looked like, so younger generations that would be most affected by this change might be looking to the past, beyond 5 years ago when the big, bad thing happened, to a time that makes more sense to them? I know a lot of people are tired of talking about COVID, but we can’t deny it plays a major role in what’s happening here. It seems so obvious why after almost five years since we had to quarantine indoors for months, and five years since we’ve had to be hypervigilant about community health, crowd sizes, mask wearing, and stopping the spread that many have become jaded and blasé about those concerns. It makes perfect sense that they would be wistful for a time when they were young, in crowded clubs that were wall to wall with strangers, all dancing and experiencing community together. Even Smith himself thinks that “one of the reasons his music is taking off right now is that after COVID isolation, people miss going nuts.” Young people in particular are yearning for that time, even though they didn’t experience it initially, because the pandemic struck during their high school, college, or young adult years, effectively robbing them of those early adulthood experiences that they felt they should have had. Combined with the internet and the hyper-surveillance many feel because of social media, the lack of third spaces, and the lack of community thanks to rugged individualism, the lack of upward mobility and financial security, the rise of fascism, and the rise of climate crisis related natural disasters, many in the younger generations, myself included, have felt what Mark Fisher called “lost futures.”

Mark Fisher was another writer who has written about nostalgia, and particularly what he coined as Hauntology. Specifically thinking about electronic music, Fisher applied his theory of Hauntology to the genre by saying “If electronic music was futuristic,…Twenty-first-century electronic music had failed to progress beyond what had been recorded in the twentieth century: practically anything produced in the 2000s could have been recorded in the 1990s. Electronic music had succumbed to its own inertia and retrospection.”

Fisher writes that in the 21st century, what haunts us “is not so much the past as all the lost futures that the twentieth century taught us to anticipate.” For so many reasons, including but not limited to the impact of COVID, we are experiencing the loss of a future that we were taught to anticipate. Fisher continues to say that “the disappearance of the future mean[s] the deterioration of a whole mode of social imagination: the capacity to conceive of a world radically different from the one in which we currently live.” Because of the “lost future” that we were anticipating, younger generations are experiencing what Fisher would consider a lack of social imagination, causing this looking backward at eras before the pandemic, before rising political divisiveness, and before social media.

Fisher also sees the internet as something that has “most radically contracted space and time,” making “events that [were] spatially distant…available to audiences instantaneously.” This “erosion of spatiality” caused by the internet has allowed younger generations to have much wider access to the aesthetics and sounds of the past, as well as access to older generations who are able to point out in real time the recycling of past eras. We can then see this revival of early aughts music as an example of Hauntology, “that which..in actuality is no longer, but which is still effective as a virtuality,” which creates a “traumatic ‘compulsion to repeat,’” which is itself a “fatal pattern.” Because of the internet giving us access to archival images and access to the entire library of recorded music in an instant, no longer is there spatiality between eras and generations, which is necessary for the repetition of the culture cycle. Because of the collapse of this spatiality, now we have access to all eras, as well as the original key players and original participants who are still alive, active, and seeing their culture being revived, which can bring up uncomfortable feelings about aging, the passage of time, and one’s own mortality.

What The Dare, and brat summer on the whole represent is a return to this era of being with like-minded people in person, sharing an experience. Smith said “That's part of the whole thesis of The Dare. I just think people should get out more and go dancing more and make music with other people in real life more.” And it’s working. Multiple articles have been written about writers going to The Dare’s shows to see what the hype is about and what they find is Gen Z-ers who were too young to be in clubs and Brooklyn lofts in the early aughts, but now they get to experience this second wave. What surprised me in reading these articles is that these young show-goers are very aware of their own romanticization and even the inauthenticity of the entire thing, one concert-goer telling a journalist for The Cut “Obviously, we’re having a moment that is reactionary. He’s bringing it back,.. It’s kind of a touch exciting to feel like you’re in it, but I definitely think it’s not genuine in a way.” But participants that even called themselves haters at the beginning of the night, by the end “felt the crowd was more authentic and into the music and art of it all than they’d anticipated.” The writer of the piece noted that “in the lag between sets, only some people whip out their phones and turn to them as a pacifier for their lack of stimulation. Instead, they [gasp] talk to one another; some of them even … laugh?” In another piece written for GQ, the writer notices some concert-goers “raise point-and-shoot digital cameras” to snap photos of Smith as The Dare.

The return of in-person concert going, conversation-making between sets, digital-cameras-snapping, and the recently reported trend of “dumb phones,” shows even further this desire of younger generations to go back to a time before social media and the prevalence of smartphones. Which I would think older generations would consider a win, given how much they’ve complained throughout my whole life about how the kids aren’t talking to each other, we’re socially inept, we’re regressing all because of the damn phones. But now we’re putting down the phones, isn’t that what you wanted? Who cares if The Dare is “derivative” of early aughts music? And who cares if brat summer overstayed its welcome? While many, including Smith himself are “exhausted by the internet and social media,” and are wishing for “a taste of pre-streaming, pre-algorithmic gritty glamor,” that’s exactly what brat summer and The Dare have given us. In this late-stage capitalism/climate crisis/fascist hellscape, younger generations are just trying to survive while the rug continues to be pulled out from under us. Can you blame us?

1. Simon Reynolds, Simon Reynolds, Retromania (2010). 423.

2. Reynolds, Retromania. 421-422.