'People want to return to a dirtier, less fashionable era'

Provocateur and professional party animal The Dare chats to Annabel Nugent about his debut album, getting the Daily Mail all riled up, and why he hates the words indie sleaze’

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On any given day before 2pm, you will find The Dare in bed. “Nothing interesting tends to happen before two in the afternoon,” he says emphatically. It’s exactly the sort of cool, blase thing you’d expect to hear from the man and musician leading New York’s club scene down a rabbit hole of debauched decadence.

It’s gone 10am when we speak and The Dare, albeit awake, is indeed in bed. Not at home, mind you, but in a hotel room in Paris where the 28-year-old continues his sold-out tour on the heels of his debut album What’s Wrong with New York? The record itself arrived on the back of a big-time collaboration with Charli XCX and Billie Eilish, as well as his own viral hit “Girls” – a tongue-in-cheekly misogynistic electroclash paean to all the women he’d like to sleep with. A diverse category, it turns out, ranging from the obvious (“girls who like to fuck”) to the silly (“girls who got so much hair on they ass, it clogs the drain”).

Such a quick succession of events, combined with the added allure of his beguilingly formal uniform, a suit and skinny tie a la Paul Weller circa 1977, has given rise to one question: who is The Dare?

Harrison Patrick Smith devised the moniker when he was still working as a substitute school teacher in New York two years ago. In person, he has little of the braggadocio of his alter ego. Smith’s is a quiet confidence, evident in the way he reclines in bed mid-interview and how casually he deploys a bookish knowledge of music history. He does, though, share The Dare’s look: a Sixties mod mop and endearingly gap-toothed smile. (Not since Renee Zellweger in Bridget Jones has an American looked so British.)

“There’s a lot of musicians who just live their songs and