The Dare: What’s Incorrect With New York? Album Assessment

The Dare’s mission is to deliver again sleaze and intercourse, however to this point his music has felt principally like a LARP. The deliciously carnal “Ladies” kickstarted Harrison Patrick Smith’s one-man electroclash revival, turning him in a single day right into a shiny journal It Boy and a punching bag for critics exhausted by Dimes Sq. scenesters. However final yr’s half-baked Intercourse EP didn’t construct on the hype. Now, after a bump in visibility for his manufacturing on Charli xcx’s tight and slinky “Guess,” the Dare’s debut album arrives within the type of a musical manifesto. The title, What’s Incorrect With New York?, is a rhetorical query. The Dare, together with his used-car-salesman blazer, thunderous bass, and attractive dance-punk swagger, is right here to rescue the town from its sexless pandemic slumber and Make New York Wicked Once more.

At 10 tracks, What’s Incorrect With New York? doubles the Dare’s catalog whereas doubling down on every part that’s made his music so queasy. It’s much more redolent of LCD Soundsystem, however with a slimy, trashy edge; think about James Murphy coaching as a pick-up artist. It oozes with desperation to sound edgy and funky like NYC rockers of fable. The Dare has spoken about eager to deliver again dissolution, to revive offensive enjoyable to dance-rock. That might thrill if executed proper, and in sure electrifying moments, the Dare get shut. However the album largely hits like a contact excessive, a simulation of a chaotic night time out. It’s like BRAT for style consultants who brag about getting listed.

What’s Incorrect With New York? is break up between typical Dare fare—libido-maxxed hooks, throaty groans—and hackneyed stabs at tender, post-bender profundity. He recycles the 2 finest tracks from his EP, “Ladies” and “Good Time,” which hurls voluptuous synth bass and garish hoots into an influence surge of tipsy electrical energy. “Motion” cranks the adrenaline to peak monstrosity, like Fischerspooner’s “Emerge” rewired for body-bashing dancefloor freakouts. Spotlight “I Destroyed Disco” is much more unforgiving, evoking Justice distorto-blare. It has a few of Smith’s most hubristic lyrics—“I break information, glasses, faces, kick the entire world within the tooth with my untied laces”—however they work as a result of he commits to the bit. Darkish bass thuds like depth cost detonations and climaxes in a shockwave of bleeps. File beneath electro-crash.

Most frequently, this music conjures solely the obscure sense that you just would possibly’ve heard it earlier than, in a extra placing rendition, by a extra progressive band. “All Night time” has catchy chants nevertheless it principally seems like a lairy, drunken tackle early MGMT. The insipid “You’re Invited”—during which he repeats “You’re invited” over a Rapture inspo beat—sounds just like the tagline for the app that’s going to disrupt the personal occasion business. The video for the characterless “Fragrance” certainly appears to be a faux business, filled with slender fashions in monochrome.