He Can Write Trance Music, But It Don’t Mean Jack
This electroclash nerd has things to say about “Truth Before Dare,” Deep Thrills’ witty, LCD Soundsystem-inspired diss track on The Dare.
Harrison Patrick Smith, the 29-year-old behind The Dare, is New York’s breakout star. Donning the black suit, the matching skinny tie, and thick-rimmed, opaque sunglasses, he holds tightly to his self-imposed claim as heir to New York’s original electroclash indie rocker LCD Soundsystem. His music prioritizes fun and pleasure, doing away with introspection. It's straightforward: he likes the girls who drugs (“Girls”), his perfume is $5.99 (“Perfume”), and so on. There are some attempts at showing vulnerability—“Elevation” finds him lonely and seeking partnership, and the finale “You Can Never Go Home” observes the crash out of an exhilarating night in the city—but lyrically, they have the same amount of soul as “Give Me Everything” by Pitbull feat. Ne-Yo et al. Simply put, the strongest songs are the ones where he’s just saying anything, finding flashy words to accompany the banger club music he produced.
The Dare’s ‘nerdy, cool guy with a mysterious and quirky aura’ persona gets in the way of otherwise decent quality dance music that serves its purpose of getting the crowd moving. Paste, for example, didn’t like the “Good Time” lyric, “I’m in the club while you’re online!” because, as the critic wrote, “too many people are on their phones at the club anyhow.” (NoBells also took issue with the lyric, as their reporters once went to a party hosted by The Dare that was practically staged for attendees’ Instagram Stories.) Plus, the New York indie rocker identity is entirely put-on. The Dare is a transplant like the rest of us, coming from Los Angeles. He started out as the front man of Turtlenecked, a failed indie rock project that approached Pacific Northwest music scene like it had some kind of algorithm to “hack.” He was hand-picked by Charli xcx and hosted parties for New York Fashion Week. He signed to a major record label (Republic Records/Polydor) after his second-ever single “Good Time.” He figured out the market that will buy what he’s selling.
The Dare is engineered to be New York, but is his idea of the city, as well as its music scene, real? For the uber-rich parasites of Dimes Square that invite him to parties, sure. Conservatives have a long history of preferring kitsch—a consumable product that distills all the properties of daring and avant-garde art without having to do any of the work—over anything with genuine taste. They like to get drunk, say slurs, and convince themselves mass culture is subculture to deny their own staleness.1 But for the true music nerds of the city, he’s just above an influencer, selling a cardboard cut-out version of a lifestyle, not just music.
The Dare does not engage with the history. He claims that he’s reviving this “New York sound” without actually revisiting the classics and putting a modern spin on it. In a 2022 GQ profile, he calls himself a “music nerd,” yet the subject changes before he lists his influences, and only the author compares him to James Murphy (LCD Soundsystem), Liquid Liquid, DFA (also Murphy), and The Rapture. We can certainly hear a bit them throughout his record—as well as some later artists like Calvin Harris and Avicii—but only in the way that DJs namelessly blend everything together because it sounds cool.
The clearest example is The Dare’s understanding of LCD Soundsystem. He knows who LCD Soundsystem is—he purposefully dresses like James Murphy, only with a thicker tie and more enthusiasm for the luxury brands—as well as the general gist of his discography. But, does Smith think all he did was talk in loose, witty fragments about being a DJ over an electric guitar, some drums, and a bunch of layered samples of French house and disco beats? Because that’s how songs like “All Night”—whose lyrics depicting a day-in-the-life of a full-time party boy whine over a pulsing, early-aughts-inspired nu-disco beat—come across.2 Does he think that 2007’s Sound Of Silver’s exploration of New York nightlife didn’t also address ageism in the industry, the pervasiveness of consumerism and social media over musical experience, then-mayors Rudy Giuliani’s and Michael Bloomberg’s strategic and reactionary crackdown on indie sub-cultures? Because the attitude he gives in “I Destroyed Disco,” a cocky and surface-level declaration that he’s the Next Big Thing with groundbreaking music that will make us all forget about Murphy, certainly exposes his neutrality toward NYC’s love and respect for the iconic artist. Moreover, titling his debut record What’s Wrong With New York? after its spiritual predecessor ends with the heartbreaking track, “New York I Love You, but You’re Bringing Me Down” reads like an ignorant, if not patronizing, retort that dismisses all the real problems the nightlife and indie rock subcultures faced in the middle of the decade.
These thoughts about The Dare are perfectly encapsulated in “Truth Before Dare,” a standalone single just over four minutes by Deep Thrills (DT), an emerging indie DJ that also makes electro-house music. It’s what made me finally understand what’s wrong about The Dare in the first place.3
Written from the point of view of the clear (sore) loser in the fight for fame, “Truth Before Dare” slings its witty jabs at Smith’s flimsy persona; it incorporates a bit of each electro-dance subgenre into the music, taking the listener on a brief history of the art form. He challenges Smith to a “Who can be the better James Murphy hack?” competition and triumphs, making an earnest (and good) homage to LCD Soundsystem’s 2005 breakout song “Losing My Edge.” (His music video even adopts the same visuals of a close-up shot of himself singing while a hand keeps punitively slapping him.) Most of all, the song asks a bigger question of artistry versus marketability. Looking at his own lack of popularity relative to his counterpart, Deep Thrills asks if the industry has any room left for the real music nerds of the world. What does it mean to be a “truthful” New York DJ? Who gets to claim the legacy left behind by the house DJ staples like Justice, Daft Punk, Soulwax, SebastiAn, Liquid Liquid, and James Murphy: the person that’s actually creating conversations with their music, or the one that profited the most off it? What will happen to the future of electro if all the kids know is a flattened, pop-ified, derivation?
The song begins with DT speaking in a firm yet slow cadence, “If a person forgets an idea that they love, it’s a horror.” This is the thesis of the track: DT seems preoccupied with his obsession with history, how it makes him a better artist, and how none of that apparently matters to a culture that prioritizes image over education. Over a vibrant, less lo-fi reimagining of LCD Soundsystem’s base melody of “Losing My Edge,” the DJ sees The Dare as the human embodiment of weed killer, poisoning the genre with his flashy, hollow persona that, musically speaking, is uncreative and predictable. The line “I moved to LA / And said ‘I wanna do New York!’ / Everyone loved it!” is devastatingly funny. It captures Smith’s entitlement: like I said before, he’s an LA-born West Coaster that woke up one day, realized the Seattle indie schtick wasn’t working, and declared he was going to become the It Boy of New York City. Following up with the bolder, more absurd line, “I was gonna be the greatest Britpop band ever to come out of the US,” DT presents Smith even more like an outsider to this very specific genre of music—one that’s attached to a precise culture and geographic identity that not anyone can claim. (It’s also a cheeky callback to Smith’s serious case of “British face.”)
The climax of “Truth Before Dare” is the third verse, where DT forgets about The Dare completely and turns inward to figure out what went wrong. “I was sure of it,” he claims in an exasperated voice. “the writing was on the wall / I've been talking over my tracks for years!” Like his idol James Murphy, he was there as a member of the Limewire generation, ripping off all the famous indie DJs’ music to make his own mixes, build his libraries, and educate his own art. Intimate knowledge, he believed, was the barrier for entry in the NYC electronic scene: “I was here before there / I was truth before dare!” he yells. Unlike his opponent, he doesn’t just present a mish-mash of everything—conflating all the nuances of Busy P., Kavinsky, Mr. Oizo, and all the other French producers into one “French Touch” category—and then say, “It’s just fun dance music; it doesn’t mean anything!” DT’s earnest love for the genre manifests itself in a nerdy appreciation for purism, and it’s disheartening to see NYC forget its own vibrant, punk-ish, and genuinely cool roots in favor of a flashy, admittedly corny pastiche of a personality that existed 20 years ago.
Most importantly, “Truth Before Dare” sounds fresh. The cornier tracks on What’s Wrong With New York? always have that ONE looping sound that turns the song from a dated gimmick to a grating skip. (Why did Smith include that ridiculous slide whistle in “You’re Invited”? What’s with those Walk The Moon synths in the “Elevation” chorus?) When DT first declares “But I can do dubstep” in the chorus, it’s that inclusion of a quiet, vibrating bass pattern that dials the energy just slightly up enough to build anticipation for the eventual dance break. Sounds appear at the moment he names a new subgenre, and each iteration of the chrous builds even more layers. “Truth Before Dare” is also a head-banger: the punchy drums, gutsy bass, and glittery production in the instrumental break are catchy enough to get lost in. The only way to enjoy the whirlwind is to dance along to it. He incorporates a little bit of every subgenre—some flairs and flourishes that have become signature motifs by his idols—proving that one can reference electroclash history without creating a whole image that says, “This is what I’m doing!”
The Dare knows how to produce a hit, but Deep Thrills has taste. That’s what makes the lesser-known artist cooler: by focusing less on getting into the right parties and meeting the right celebrities, instead striving to push the electroclash envelope, he marries the spunky attitude of the subculture with impressive, substantive dance music. He gives us meat.
Maybe Deep Thrills is never going to take off; or maybe he’ll pull a James Murphy and become famous in his mid-30s.4 If you’re an electroclash nerd, I’d check out his SoundCloud because he is a skilled and knowledgable DJ with a confident sense of identity. His music doesn’t sound like a soundtrack to a CobraSnake slideshow, and it’s firmly rooted in the New York tradition of house and nu-disco. It has all the throwbacks without sounding like a pastiche: DT reads like an evolution, not a revivalist.
Header image edited by author. Every image and video included belongs to the proper owner, credited above.
There is no evidence The Dare throws around slurs. It’s just the people he chose to surround himself with when he began hosting club nights in Manhattan.
It’s also likely The Dare listened to “Drunk Girls” off This Is Happening once and thought that was all James Murphy did. While Murphy indulged in the stupid song from time to time, this is also the record that has “I Can Change,” “Dance Yrself Clean,” “All I Want,” and “Home.”
Not too long ago, I said I liked The Dare’s brash, reckless sensibilities—that they embodied the attitudes of young New Yorkers today. That contradicts a lot of what I’m saying now, but if anything, it’s just a good example of music journalism changing with the times. Critics grow just as artists do! I don’t, however, hate The Dare’s music: I think there’s a time and place for silly, lighthearted songs that sound good at the club. If no one takes off their sunglasses, then he’s a perfectly fine artist.
I don’t actually know anything about DT’s personal life, so he could be around James Murphy’s age around the time he released the Self-Titled LCD Soundystem record.