The Dare's fervour lacks charm on What's Wrong With New York?

The difference between Murphy & The Dare can best be represented by their names. Murphy sounds like a music nerd, and is, with a dorky sincerity beneath the contracted pretension; The Dare sounds like he’s trying to convince the bouncer to let him, and reeks of the vibe.

If you’re going to ape the Archbishop of the New York dance-punk scene, commit to more than just a bit. As it stands, What’s Wrong with New York? commits to an aesthetic reimagining of the mid-2000s dance-punk scene spearheaded by acts like LCD Soundsystem, Hercules & Love Affair, and the ordained Tim Goldsworthy – hallowed be-thy-name, rather than its spirit. It’s a moment in time with more reverence amongst its fans than the original Star Wars trilogy, a fanbase that is decidedly more likely to hit a line over the ashes of CBGB than cry about misappropriated lightsaber colours. However, if you’re going to fake your way into a club, don’t pick the club basing its personality on putting off posers.

The Dare has a song, mind you. It’s written a few different ways over this breezy and provokingly inoffensive listen, but it’s singular for the attentive listener; all one must do to piece together its homogeneity is spend any length of time with any track in the listing, no small feat. Either The Dare is a double agent working on behalf of the tired argument that all dance music sounds the same, trying to destroy the genre from the inside, or he’s trying to make it easy for Weird Al to do a style parody of himself, the more valiant of the two options.

On its own merits, there’s an air of the film Yesterday, but instead of a world without the Beatles, The Dare is trying to present the New York songbook to the Zoomer masses with such generality that he legally cannot be paternity-traced to any one act. Slap a bass on top of some rumbling rhythms and a synth so glitchy that every line feels like a mis-input that made it through post, and all that’s left to do is pull a line from your notebook of “TikTok virality potential.” I’m one of those Zoomers, and it’s not the trick he thinks it is.

Like a high-end sushi bar helmed by a white man who swears he studied in Osaka, no really, it’s the ethos of this joint that I can’t get behind. A persona with a standoffish attitude is still a journalistically punchable face, no matter how much it’s a put-on. You’re just going to come into our proverbial house party, make a mess of the rug because you were trying to show everyone that you could do a backflip and knocked over my Vodka Crans, and try to leave early. You can convert that into age-old wisdom about being yourself, or you can listen here. In this life, on both sides of the dancefloor, you’re either the guy writing “Losing My Edge” or you’re the poser it's written about.