Does The Dare sound too much like LCD Soundsystem?

Middle 8 · ten points from the transcript
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  1. The Dare, Harrison Patrick Smith, draws LCD Soundsystem comparisons on four specific counts: squelchy synths, claps on the backbeat, a half-drunk James Murphy vocal impression, and album art that echoes LCD's.
    ▶ 00:00:24
  2. The borrowing is wider than one band. Electroclash, new rave, blog house and dance punk are named as the tangled web he pulls from, each one a collision of punk energy, electronic gear and no interest in being respectable.
    ▶ 00:01:05
  3. Before this he made anxious indie rock in Portland under the name Turtleneck. Girls was written in under an hour during lockdown as a reaction against music he thought had become too smooth and too serious.
    ▶ 00:02:42
  4. He uploaded it in August 2022 and TikTok did the rest, while he was still a substitute teacher by day and DJing Lower East Side parties by night.
    ▶ 00:03:03
  5. The ascent took about a year: Good Time triggered a major-label bidding war in early 2023, he signed to Republic and released the Sex EP, then co-produced Charli XCX's Guess, which hit number one in the UK in August 2024, a month before his debut album.
    ▶ 00:03:29
  6. What's Wrong with New York? is engineered for replay, ten tracks in 27 minutes, and the party cracks on Good Time with a line about being on the brink that turns the club into a coping mechanism rather than a solution.
    ▶ 00:05:01
  7. The argument got loud enough that moderators of the LCD Soundsystem subreddit banned all Dare-related posts to stop the forum collapsing into it.
    ▶ 00:06:36
  8. The defence is that LCD Soundsystem was itself pastiche, as were The Rapture and The Strokes. James Murphy once told Bowie he steals from him liberally, and Bowie answered that you cannot steal from a thief.
    ▶ 00:06:57
  9. The sharpest claim in the video: indie sleaze was not a thing in the 2000s. Nobody used the term. It appeared around 2021 when TikTok trend forecasters and fashion magazines needed a name, so the music was retrofitted to a fashion revival rather than the other way round.
    ▶ 00:08:08
  10. The closing distinction is the clearest statement of what separates the two acts: LCD Soundsystem made music about knowing too much and feeling lost, and The Dare makes music about knowing too much and dancing anyway.
    ▶ 00:11:34