Artists You Should Know: The Dare Revives Rowdy Nightlife On New Single "Good Time"

The Dare is back with a new single and video with the release of “Good Time,” a glitchy dance rager from the Brooklyn-based vocalist, songwriter, and producer Harrison Patrick Smith. Prior to this new project, he’d released music under the moniker Turtlenecked and was even a resident DJ at a New York dive bar. Now Smith is wading into the realms of house and techno as The Dare — bringing with him all the raucous energy of the city’s nightlife. The culmination of which has been the Freakquencies parties he’s been hosting at Home Sweet Home in New York and this winter he’ll be bringing the party to the west coast in Los Angeles this winter.

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In “Good Time,” The Dare continue their revival of chaotic bloghouse that began with the release of their very first single. So it probably comes as no surprise that Smith’s music — with all its industrial-sized sonics and ferally pulsating beats — echoes not only the hypnotic soundscapes of the bygone genre but also its vicious energy. On “Good Time” this takes the form of a drilling melody of cacophonous synths that take turns pummeling the track’s rhythm into a jittery collection of frayed noise that Smith sings over.

It’s exactly the kind of track perfect for raging sweatily while covered in strobe-flashing darkness. But “Good Time” also offers up the seedy underbelly of such an indulgence in hedonistic desire. One that highlights the very reasons why people become addicted to the thrill and cling to it desperately as a lifeline. “Oh, let’s have some fun tonight,” Smith shrieks over the track. “Yeah, I might start a fight / ‘Cause we’re all on the brink of suicide, yeah.”

“Good Time” also comes with a music video that captures all the heady euphoria of the scene it dutifully recreates within its sonic world. Illuminated by the harsh flicker of a strobe it sees Smith wandering dead-eyed through a party he seems to be the limp center of. As women hand him cigarettes to smoke (drooping from his mouth) and pull at his clothes on the dancefloor he’s whisked away in the electric current that throbs from “Good Time.”