Over the past few months, tastemakers and artists on the trendier side of the pop spectrum have become obsessed with reviving “indie sleaze.” Indie sleaze is an aesthetic defined, as far as I can tell, by early-2000s digital photographs of dancing people who definitely know the name of every neighborhood in Brooklyn. While the movement’s most successful artist — commercially and artistically — is Charli XCX, its most definitive, for better and worse, is The Dare.
The Dare — government name Harrison Smith — resembles the platonic ideal of indie sleaze. He’s skinny, pale and disheveled. I have yet to see a picture of him where he isn’t wearing sunglasses inside. He has risen to stardom on the back of two breakout hits: “Guess,” which he produced for the aforementioned Charli XCX, and “Girls,” which was the lead single from his album “What’s Wrong With New York?”
“Girls” is a good song. The Dare’s tired-sounding delivery, pounding bassline and raunchy lyrics mesh well, and it’s short enough that it doesn’t have time to become annoying. The rest of “What’s Wrong With New York?” is much worse.
The album’s first song, “Open Up,” sounds like it should have been a B-side to “Girls.” It’s basically the same song but quieter and not as catchy. Track two, “Good Time,” is another song about how Smith wants to have sex at parties. It’s fine. Track three, “Perfume,” is a solidly constructed track with lyrics about how everybody wants to have sex with The Dare. It seems The Dare is not one for variety.
After “Girls,” the next song on the tracklist is a decent, braggadocious cut titled “I Destroyed Disco.” More so than any other track on the album, “I Destroyed Disco” is an obvious attempt to make an LCD Soundsystem song. The Dare rants sprechgesang style about how cool he is and how everyone wants to be like him — “you’ll never reach my level,” he sneers, “so don’t chase it.”
It’s unapologetically reminiscent of LCD’s classic debut single “Losing My Edge,” where James Murphy insists that he was “the first guy playing Daft Punk to the rock kids” before shouting out a list of underground bands that he likes more than you do. Murphy seems both genuine and cartoonish. He caricatures the obsessive music snob in order to interrogate his own fears about his impending obsolescence.
The Dare, on the other hand, is a one-trick pony. His persona is mildly diverting performance art centered around a single question: how far can someone get by pretending to be the guy James Murphy is always singing about? The answer, it seems, is not very far.
His attempts to sing about more personal and serious subjects on songs like “Elevation” and “You Can Never Go Home” feel inauthentic. These songs lack any of the lyrical vulnerability and musical elegance that allowed the 2000s artists he borrows from to become indie-rock mainstays.
The entire time I was listening to “What’s Wrong With New York?” I couldn’t stop thinking about one specific line from LCD Soundsystem’s first album. “Here comes the new, stylish creep,” Murphy sighs on the track “On Repeat,” bemoaning the omnipresence of the latest and greatest hip scenester.
What Murphy realized, however, is that newness and stylishness are fleeting. In the long run, branding yourself as the coolest guy ever is the most uncool thing an artist can possibly do. You can destroy disco all you want, but nothing can stop you from eventually losing your edge.
