Harrison Patrick Smith, a.k.a. the Dare, is New York's newest king of buzz

NEW YORK — Around 11 o’clock on a mid-February evening, the backroom of the Bowery's basement bar and club Home Sweet Home is hazy, loud and growing more claustrophobic by the minute — and it's still ramping up. The thump of a Swedish dance hit from 2005 segues into Britney Spears's 2003 club smash "Toxic." A girl in a silk slip dress dances with another girl in a tight popcorn shirt. Throughout the club, baggy pants grind up against low-slung miniskirts while digital cameras flash around the room and a disco ball spins overhead, so slow as to seem sarcastic. Hardly a soul is credibly over 25.

The top canopy of the dance floor is dotted with trucker hats, one of which says "SEX ADDICT." A dude in a 1975 band shirt downs a Pabst Blue Ribbon by himself in the corner before rejoining the throng. And at 11:05, a slim guy in a black suit hops into the DJ booth, greeted by an eruption of cheers.

All over downtown Manhattan and sprawling into Brooklyn, this is what parties are starting to look like: wild, sweaty, achingly nostalgic for a time most attendees remember vaguely, if at all. Mark Hunter, a photographer, became famous as the Cobrasnake for his unvarnished, chaotic party photos in New York and Los Angeles throughout the 2000s and early 2010s before taking a hiatus that lasted just about exactly as long as the golden age of Instagram. Now 37, Hunter has been called back to active duty, shooting shows and parties and DJ nights like this one. ("I’ve held on to a lot of my wardrobe," Hunter says with a laugh, "so I can just wear the same things I wore 15 years ago.") Present in a number of Hunter's recent photos is the same besuited figure from the booth: Harrison Patrick Smith, the 27-year-old musician better known as the Dare, who has recently achieved an "it" status where he presides over the humid bacchanalia of his Thursday night "Freakquencies" residency at Home Sweet Home and who is also seen front-row at fashion shows and DJing parties hosted by Hedi Slimane.

Smith is fast becoming a prominent figure in the thrift-shopping, determinedly analog strain of Y2K nostalgia that has earned the weird catchall moniker "indie sleaze," as well as one of the faces of New York City under Gen Z occupation. After all, every generation has its downtown New York scene, complete with its "it" figures. One could argue, though, that every new iteration emulates a previous one — that the Dare's New York borrows liberally from the "Meet Me in the Bathroom" era of the Strokes, the Yeah Yeah Yeahs and LCD Soundsystem, which was itself drawing on CBGB's era of the Ramones and Talking Heads, which followed in the footsteps of the Factory era of Warhol and the Velvet Underground. Does it all lead inevitably to a sad, blurry Xerox-of-a-Xerox approximation of cool? And, crucially, does it matter to anyone who currently is cool?

If you, like many others, learned about Smith just recently from the flurry of reviews of his new four-song release, "The Sex EP," then you probably know he's a musician whose sound (squidgy electro beats and atonally yowl-rapped lyrics such as "Sex, it's what I’m thinking of, some people call it love / I might even finish it way too quick") and personal style (always in a skinny-tied black suit ensemble) are just reminiscent enough of a particular 2000s New York music scene to thrill those who know that scene by its retro mystique and rankle those who were there.

Critics have described Smith's sound as, to put it politely, derivative. "He is doing LCD Soundsystem doing Justice doing Peaches doing Liquid Liquid doing Lizzy Mercier Descloux," wrote Sophie Kemp at Pitchfork. "To even comment … is to have lost the game," lamented Rolling Stone's Maura Johnston. For an artist with just four officially released tracks to his name, Smith has garnered an inordinate amount of press buzz that has made him the subject of a major-label bidding war. The attention also has its downsides: The raunchy-looking adolescents-in-mock-flagrante cover image of "The Sex EP," coupled with the fact that Smith is a former substitute teacher, have drawn the eye and ire of the most QAnon-brained in the depths of Twitter, who say he's contributing to the "normalization of pedophilia." (Smith declined to comment on the controversy, and he was not made available for an interview for this story.)

In 2001, Jonathan Galkin co-founded the independent label DFA Records, home of LCD Soundsystem, whose frontman, James Murphy, is also a co-founder. Galkin later founded FourFour Records, and he remembers the day the Dare's first single, "Girls," came out last year. "I got all these texts and DMs. ‘Dude, have you heard this?’" he remembers. "Like, ‘It's going to remind you of LCD. It's going to push all your buttons.’"

At the time, Galkin demurred. It was just one song, and "I definitely don't like playing the role of old man yelling at a cloud," he says. After he had listened to all of "The Sex EP" for this story, though, Galkin had a verdict: Smith's yelping vocals were superficially like LCD's, sure. But "Girls" landed on Galkin's ear like a less self-aware version of the Beastie Boys classic of the same title, and the EP like the "boring heterosexual take" on the work of Larry Tee, the producer credited with founding electroclash and launching the careers of RuPaul and Peaches, among others. "I was looking for the nuance, like, ‘Am I missing the joke here?’" Galkin says of the song that goes: "I like girls who got degrees, girls on killin’ sprees / I like girls who got a bone to pick with me."

In May, Smith played two back-to-back shows in the city, at the Public Hotel's ArtSpace venue in Manhattan and at Baby's All Right in Williamsburg, and the reaction was markedly different and more enthusiastic. "That was sick," one damp and exhilarated concertgoer says to his companions at the end of the Dare's show at Baby's All Right, in which Smith whipped the crowd into a frenzy just by repeatedly punching a cymbal, the only instrument onstage. "Absolutely so good," another gushes before they head outside to the ample smoking section out in front of the venue for cigarettes. (Yes, analog, paper-carton cigarettes.) At events like these — the primordial ooze of the indie-sleaze revival scene — Smith thrashes around onstage in his suit while young people thrash around in the audience wearing Ed Hardy and Los Angeles Apparel, the modern reincarnation of Dov Charney's American Apparel. "The studded jeans, all that stuff, is coming back so big," Hunter says. "The camouflage, all those things."

It's all a perfect re-creation of a 2000s that didn't entirely happen. The kind of parties Hunter was photographing back then, guys like Galkin — situated at the heart of the indie music scene at the time — weren't attending. "I never went to those parties," Galkin says. "Those parties were very disconnected from what DFA was doing." Indeed, like the Dare, indie sleaze is a sort of greatest-hits mishmash of 2000s ephemera, and we find ourselves here because hindsight can always be counted on to collapse context and forget specifics.

Sam Ritchie, a 29-year-old who works at a national park in Wyoming, went to the Baby's All Right show with friends on a recent return to her college hometown. Ritchie and her friends had such an "absolute blast," she says, that they scrapped their plans to go home afterward. They stayed out into the early-morning hours, walking the Williamsburg Bridge into Manhattan and the Brooklyn Bridge back. Nat Tucker, a 24-year-old who works in marketing, saw something there that she hasn't seen lately in other small concert spaces: fans. "People just go because they like the venue, or they’re like: ‘Oh, this band seems cool. Let me check them out for the first time,’" she says. At this show, Tucker says, everyone knew the words.

Emily Sachs, a 27-year-old software engineer, frequently treks to concerts from her home on the Upper East Side. The Dare's Brooklyn show offered an energy level she has been desperately seeking and largely failing to find, especially since the start of the coronavirus pandemic. Concertgoers were crowd-surfing, moshing, putting camera phones away — partly to protect them from getting dropped and trampled, partly to rage harder in real time.

All told, Sachs is lukewarm on the aesthetics of the 2000s. She likes that the Dare sounds a little like Cobra Starship and 3OH!3; she has largely skipped the clothes. Still, "if the indie-sleaze scene is going to be the one that, like, pushes for people being really present and having fun at shows again," she says, "then I will gladly go to indie-sleaze shows."

"I think what people are trying to channel is something that's less polished, that's more real. That messy rock-and-roll energy of getting really sweaty at a party," Hunter says. Smith, he adds, is "channeling that exact kind of energy."

"The kids are dancing," Galkin agrees. "Obviously he's doing something right."

Will Sommer contributed to this report.