Seeing The Dare at one of his regular Freakquencies parties goes something like this: a sea of cool kids, wondering if the sweat on your skin belongs to you or someone else, surprise spins from stars like Charli XCX, dancing to heart-racing electro-clash; blurry visions of a disco ball, legs in ripped fishnets, quick glimpses of his signature slim black suit; cigarette smoke and a crowd yelling, “That’s what’s up!” as he sings back to them, “I like girls who make love/ And I like girls who like to fuck!”

Raised in the suburbs of Seattle, Harrison Patrick Smith formed the band Turtlenecked in 2014 while studying at college in Portland. He quickly garnered a small, cult-like following and decided to bring the post-punk upstart with him to New York City in 2018, playing local gigs but picking up little steam. When Smith’s tongue-in-cheek track “Girls” — pulled together while playing with beats he found online during the pandemic — resonated with crowds at Turtlenecked shows, he decided to lean into this more direct sound.

Smith officially released “Girls” in 2022 as The Dare, horny, sleazy and dripping with 2000s nostalgia. The Pacific Northwest kid quickly became a symbol for Downtown NYC cool, emerging as both a music and fashion darling. He sat next to Nick Cave front row at a Gucci fashion show and DJed Celine designer Hedi Slimane’s after party; PAPER called his mix of synth-pop and punk an eclectic shock to “supercharge” our city’s underground scene.

In May of 2023, The Dare released his debut EP, The Sex. Clocking in at just 11 minutes, the four tracks were made for any pitch-black dance floor. Face tilted towards the ceiling as the lyrics, “I think I had it once/ I think I had a bunch,” pour out of his track “Sex,” it’s easy to decipher the EP’s key takeaway: The Dare’s unadulterated desire to push an agenda in the pursuit of hedonistic fun.

Since then, he’s continued to scoop up co-signs, like a shoutout (“Send it to The Dare/ Yeah, I think he’s with it”) and production credit for Charli XCX’s flirty track “Guess,” a standout from her culture-rattling Brat album. He also co-produced its subsequent chart-topping remix, featuring Billie Eilish, with Finneas.

The Dare’s debut album, What’s Wrong With New York?, will be followed by his first headlining tour. On lead single “Perfume,” he sings like a petulant James Murphy: “All the boys and the girls ask me, ‘What is that smell?’/ That’s my perfume!” Then, the pounding “You’re Invited” sees The Dare offer listeners the opportunity to “make a baby in a Mercedes,” putting forth even more raunchy club bops.

But there are also hints at an evolution of The Dare’s sound. Take “Elevation” as it slowly crawls forward and he admits, “I feel like taking drugs,” over expansive synths and climbing distortion. Or album closer “You Can Never Go Home,” as he echos, “You can never go home,” against the sardonic lyrics and anthemic symphonics of a Britpop track. The Dare may be cutting his teeth in tight clubs now, but WWWNY? warns of larger rooms to come.

Johnny Jewel has experienced similar success, as the legendary songwriter and producer behind Chromatics, Desire and Glass Candy. He’s also the head honcho of the indie record label Italians Do It Better. Like Smith, Jewel got his musical start in Portland, back in 1996. In conversation for PAPER, the two shift from chats about sonics to fonts, and the best Adobe software to create projections and drum samples. Underneath The Dare’s classic style and penchant for partying is an earnest music nerd poised to bring sex pop to the masses.

You two have met before. How do you know each other?

The Dare: We haven’t worked together, but we met in Barcelona at Primavera Festival this year.

Johnny Jewel: Desire was playing, The Dare was playing and we watched each other’s sets. We shared a backstage and talked about commonalities in New York and Portland.

Where are you both calling from?

Johnny Jewel: I’m in Malta. I look like this [wearing face paint] because I’m about to go DJ. This isn’t my Zoom face. I’m gonna head over to the club in like an hour or so.

The Dare: I was going to say the dedication to the look is awesome. I’m not wearing the suit. [Laughs]. I’m in LA on the east side staying at my friend’s house.

Johnny Jewel: What are you doing out in LA?

The Dare: I came out here to be part of this music video and I’m doing this PAPER shoot. I’m also going to do my party Freakquencies while I’m here, because I’m rolling out this album and trying to do events all over the place. It’s also nice to escape New York for a little bit. I’m probably staying longer than I need to.

Johnny Jewel: Is it your first time doing Freakquencies in LA?

The Dare: No, I’ve been doing it pretty regularly. It’s become a very bicoastal thing, and we’re branching out into other places. We did one in London and I want to do one in Detroit this upcoming tour. But New York and LA… I’m always here to do music business stuff, so it makes sense to throw a party while I’m here.

Johnny Jewel: Where are you doing it?

The Dare: I’m thinking about throwing it at Los Globos.

Johnny Jewel: I’ve thrown a million parties there over the years. It’s a cool spot.

The Dare: I’ve driven by it, but I’ve never been there. It looks dilapidated but has a grandeur to it. I’m excited about that.

Johnny Jewel: It’s cool. Low ceilings and it’s great for sound. Hot and sweaty, great for dancing. I did a triple-header, a Glass Candy, Desire, Chromatics New Years’ party there 10 years ago.

The Dare: I’ve been doing the parties at Home Sweet Home in New York. Something about it is fun in a way that not many clubs are because it’s so small, but people drift between the bar area, dance floor and booths. It’s unpretentious, too.

Johnny Jewel: Are you doing projections?

The Dare: I’ve been thinking about it. We just use some of the projections from the live shows for the DJ sets, but your projections during that show in Barcelona were crazy.

Johnny Jewel: Thank you, that was months of editing. Each song was like a vignette and typography. We both have a love for typography. Punchy, simple, bold. At the show, I was Bold Futura and you were Helvetica Bold.

The Dare: Yeah, but I don’t have that much design knowledge. This might be the summer that I level up.

Johnny Jewel: It’s whatever. If it works, it’s fine. The less you know about a piece of equipment the more you’re likely to do something unique. Brian Eno says, “Don’t read the manual.” You miss the opportunity to go in blind and explore.

The Dare: It’s the same thing with music. I’ve been doing it for so long now that skills and choices, like how many compressors or what effects I want in the music… part of that is establishing your voice and you have these go-to aesthetic decisions. But at the same time, I feel like I’m most excited making music when I throw it all away for one second and make some sort of insane decision. That’s when the song becomes interesting to me or comes together. Maybe those obvious decisions come in later, but there’s something happening in the song that’s new to me.

Johnny Jewel: When something’s interesting, a big part of the DNA or nucleus usually comes to me from a chaotic or chance moment or when I’m off the cuff. Then you can build on that and make something digestible for listeners who don’t want to hear something so abstract. Those are the things the audience goes wild for. That combo of instinct in chaos.

The Dare: That’s true. That’s what I like as a music listener.

Johnny Jewel: Speaking of being in music for a long time, did you tell me you used to be a drummer? Was that your first instrument?

The Dare: I’d say that and guitar. I was more formally taught guitar. I studied jazz guitar and did that for a long time. I taught myself drums in high school. I’d play for hours and hours. When I had these other bands I’d play drums and sing. I think my love of drums has informed a lot about the music I like. It points to my interest in hip-hop, dance music and anything that’s groove-based. Now it’s more focused on electro-clash and electro. That’s usually where I start when I make songs. Drums are one of the main ways that genres are differentiated.

What was the overarching inspiration for the sound behind What’s Wrong With New York?

The Dare: Johnny, like you I’m pulling from a particular palette and moment from the past, and trying to convey a certain feeling. The glamor, the dirtiness of this early 2000s New York scene, I felt was missing from my life. It was something I would fantasize about. It was world-building in my brain. It felt like a near-but-distant past that was exciting to me and I was surprised people weren’t as interested in it as I was. I wanted to do my own version of it, now. When I listen to Chromatics… people call it hauntological, this past future that never happened, like from the ’80s. I feel like I’m doing that in a different way. Do you feel that way about your music?

Johnny Jewel: When I listen to my own stuff, I never set out for it to be retro. Growing up in Houston in the ’80s, I was hearing club music and the clubs were playing Eric B. & Rakim, Gary Numan, New Order, Sinéad O’Connor, all at the same time. I wasn’t thinking of it as different genres. I was responding to this kind of sound or this kind of synthesizer. Doing Glass Candy, Chromatics and Desire, my intention was to look forward. Anyone that thinks it’s retro, in a way it is and the aesthetic is. The equipment is old, but there’s no single song you can say, “This sounds like that from 20 years ago.”

I just checked out your album. For me, it’s a similar thing. It’s a mutated thing. There’s Kraftwerk, which is in all electronic music; there’s Suicide, there’s LCD Soundsystem, there’s disco punk, like when Rapture moved from Seattle to New York to start working with James in the early 2000s; there’s electroclash vibes like Miss Kittin and Mount Sims; Richard X, who doesn’t get enough shine. I hear all that. I also hear pop music vocally like Franz Ferdinand, not directly but the sexy male bravado over dancey music. There’s a sonic core, there’s a lot of square wave and sine wave, these really edgy classic electro tones that are raw electronic. It’s less like what we’re hearing from a lot of contemporary music these days. Everything is really faded and post-deep house, vaporwave. So to hear pure electronic that’s not filtered or held back… It’s an aggressively electronic forward sound, which I love.

The Dare: All those references are spot-on for me. Obviously, I wish I discovered Richard X sooner, but I feel like I discovered him and became obsessed after like, 90% of my album was done. The brutal, simple, really unashamed electronic sounds. I’ve always thought it was cool when I can listen to a record that sounds like they just plugged in. There’s a punk spirit to it that I get off on. I’m still in love with raw and super basic sounds. When I listen to a lot of the dance, punk and electro stuff, I fantasize about people in New York and elsewhere just plugging in and getting on stage with nothing and glamming it up and having fun, and making great works with basically nothing. I just found out that “Fuck the Pain Away” by Peaches was a live recording, it was basically a one-take vocal over that loop. But I am always surprised when people comment on my music and say, “This sounds like a song that existed in 2008 or 2003.” I love all that music, but when I sit down to make songs, I’m just making songs in a very natural, unfocused and uncontrived way. So like you, it’s not an intention of making things sound retro. It’s a collected series of interests and sounds.

I definitely think that now I’ve experienced the reality of my fantasy, people have got on board with the shit I like. Not because of me, but because there’s cultural interest in that vision of New York. There are a lot of DJs, parties and fashion. It’s different than the indie rock punk world I’d inhabited previously. It’s really great, but I’ve also seen the dark side. Unfortunately, my beautiful fantasy has been a little shattered.

Johnny Jewel: The key is to avoid excess. Hopefully, the level of destruction will be lower this time around.

You’ve got to head out to your set, so any last words before we go?

The Dare: Is the world ever going to hear Dear Tommy?

Johnny Jewel: To be continued on that one. I thought you were going to plug your album.

The Dare: Oh, buy What’s Wrong With New York? by The Dare wherever you can find the record near you.

Johnny Jewel: I should remix one of your tracks.

The Dare: I’d love that.

Johnny Jewel: I’ll listen again and take a stab at one of the moody ones.

The Dare: Please, please. “Elevation” would be really cool.

Johnny Jewel: That song “All Night” that’s mellow in the beginning? I was thinking it’d be interesting to mess with. I’ll be in touch.

The Dare: All right, beautiful.

Order The Dare’s special-edition 40th Anniversary zine here

Photography: Sarah Pardini
Styling: Hunter Clem
Grooming: Michelle Harvey
Set design: Payton Newcomer

Photo assistants: Tom Lipka, Devin Szydlowski
Styling assistants: Brianna Dooley, Jeung Bok Holmquist “JB”
Production assistant: Ricardo Diaz
Production intern: Sophia Martinez

Editor-in-chief: Justin Moran
Managing editor: Matt Wille
Editorial producer: Angelina Cantú
Music editor: Erica Campbell
Zine and cover layout: Callum Abbott
Publisher: Brian Calle