Interview The Dare: “Everybody seems content to be humble, and I think that’s a fucking boring way to be an artist.”

When Harrison Patrick Smith appears on the screen for today’s call, the scene we’re greeted with is almost comically appropriate. Striding down the streets of Manhattan, black sunglasses on and slightly perspiring, with his wobbling iPhone screen panned up to background him with looming skyscrapers and bustling streets, it’s the exact image of an in demand man-about-town you might expect from an artist who’s titled their debut album ‘What’s Wrong With New York?’ Unusually for Smith, who’s been igniting and irking the pop culture-sphere in equal measure lately as The Dare, the set-up isn’t actually all-that considered. “I’ve had a bit of an insane 48 hours so I thought I’d walk and talk. Well…” he corrects himself, “it’s been insane for about a month but it’s reaching an apex right now.”

“Insane” is, by all metrics, something of an understatement. A couple of weeks before we talk, ‘Guess’ – his contribution to Charli xcx’s all-consuming ‘BRAT’ empire (co-written and produced by Smith) – blew up the internet with its sapphic Billie Eilish remix. Hitting the UK Number One spot on the singles chart, it cemented Charli as the undisputed queen of the summer while boosting Billie into top position as the most streamed artist on the planet. As for The Dare, the cultural tipping point of the last few months seems to have finally made him make sense to a lot of people: where his polarising 2022 debut single ‘Girls’ initially had the internet up in arms for its LCD Soundsystem-nodding electroclash and lyrics about “the girls who do drugs / girls with cigarettes in the back of the club”, now it’s all just, well, very BRAT.

“It’s funny… I think sometimes people need things explained to them. It’s hard to talk to the general public, especially if you’re into weird shit. Most of the public isn’t. I think Charli is amazing at not only creating new worlds and new styles of music, but she’s really good at bringing people into it and helping them feel good about experiencing those things. I’m worse at that,” he chuckles. “And also at the time when I did it, I had no relationship to the public whatsoever, nor did I ever think anybody would give a fuck, so I wasn’t really concerned about helping people figure out what I was doing, I was just doing it. So then of course, when it DID hit a lot of people they were just shocked, which is really good, honestly. I guess if it made sense to people from the start there never would have been a spark; there has to be friction.”

Boil it down and friction and spark is really what’s at the heart of The Dare’s MO. Some things that Smith likes: proper rockstars, making a statement, pissing people off sometimes if it means not being dull. Some things he doesn’t care for: being palatable just to keep people happy or even really, it seems, being ‘liked’ in the sense that he wants the internet to be his mate. He makes music about fucking and suicide and rock’n’roll. He still thinks Matty Healy is “incredible right now”. In a world of cautious platitudes, Smith is very much not that guy.