No Frills Reviews

The debut from a fitting poster boy for the Indie Sleaze Revival; an unconvincing and annoying retread

The Dare is a dude who wrote a novelty song and then built his entire act around it. You may have seen him palling around with Charlie XCX, or as a poster boy for the Indie Sleaze Revival – a revival of a genre that didn’t exist; a vague amalgamation of mid-00’s “indie” culture. In this case, it’s the sounds of electro-leaning acts like LCD Soundsystem and Peaches, alongside the aesthetics of the kind of middle-class posers that cosplayed their rockstar pretensions into serious drug addictions. It seems entirely appropriate that he represents the revival of something that was never real.

Harrison Patrick Smith previously released a series of albums under his Turtlenecked moniker, before rebranding as The Dare and breaking out with debut single, Girls, in summer 2022 (side-note – including a 2-year-old single on your album is a red flag that you don’t have enough ideas). Girls is a mildly fun slice of cookie-cutter electro-pop, plastered with a string of wannabe meme-worthy slogans. And that’s pretty much the blueprint for this album.

As Turtlenecked, Smith made a slightly more earnest brand of indie-pop. That wasn’t particularly good either, but it at least seemed like a genuine glimpse into the mind of Smith. This just feels like a character, and not a very interesting one. There’s echoes of those two acts I mentioned earlier, but the echoes are hollow. There was an element of self-parody in the early work of LCD Soundsystem; James Murphy’s musings on life as an aging hipster could be embarrassing, but they felt like a reflection of lived experiences. Or Peaches’ celebration of sex positivity; the bravado may have masked something deeper, but you fully believed she’d try to Fuck the Pain Away. The Dare sounds like he’s lost somewhere in between; his writing isn’t incisive enough to pull off humour or hedonism. It’s like he’s parodying a certain type of person, except he actually wants to be like that person.

You know how LCD Soundsystem have a few all-time great songs, then lots of average to kind-of-annoying songs? Well, The Dare basically sounds like LCD without those great songs. To be fair, there’d be some potentially enjoyable, empty-calorie electro-pop lurking in here, if Smith had the good grace to get someone with an appealing voice to sing them. But it’s rendered near unlistenable by him slurring insufferably over everything.

Have you seen the old episode of It’s Always Sunny… where Dennis and Dee become empty-headed club kids in a desperate bid for fame? If that was set now, this would be the soundtrack.

Best Tune: Elevation

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