He’s been called ‘a poster-boy for indie sleaze’, a hard-partying NY DJ who just had a global smash with Charli xcx and Billie Eilish. But is the Dare for real? As he releases his controversial debut album, we meet a superstar in the making
The Dare delays our 10am interview by an hour. “He’s been having trouble sleeping,” explains his publicist. When he emerges bleary-eyed on Zoom at 11, I ask what’s been keeping him awake, wondering if he was out late. Apparently not. “But I actually have a harder time sleeping when I stay in,” he growls. “I go out so much that there’s a natural rhythm. I walk around all night and eventually get tired. When I stay in, I feel like I have too much pent-up energy. So I just lay there all night.”
If you don’t know who the Dare is yet, that’s understandable. Despite how he dresses (almost always in a Hedi Slimane-esque skinny black suit) and the manner in which he answers questions about mild insomnia, he’s not a rock star yet. More of a microcelebrity, extremely well known to a certain subset of downtown New York scene kids, fans of Charli xcx’s future pop, the glossy magazine class and the incurably online.
