Across How to Quit Smoking, it’s clear that Dominic Fike has mastered the art of a distinctively Dominic Fike sound. It’s in his distorted, sunburned guitars, in the quake of his voice as he sing-raps, in all of the Florida nostalgia baked into his lyrics.
This is his third album, but it doesn’t feel so far removed from the 22-year-old kid who sparked a label war after uploading low-fi songs to SoundCloud in the late 2010s — and who went wildly viral for hits like “3 Nights” and “Babydoll,” the latterof which is still skyrocketing up the charts. The angst and anguish and the ability to come up with a damn good hook are still there, even if the pressures and the stress of adulthood have taken on aching new heights.
How to Quit Smoking finds Fike at 30, now a dad and still figuring a lot of things out. Throughout his past albums, he’s detailed pretty clearly what he’s gone through: Fike recorded his first EP while under house arrest for battery of a police officer; when it started blowing up, he was in jail for violating his parole. Once Columbia won the label bidding war and signed Fike for a reported $4 million, he used a lot of that money to bail his mom out of prison, where she was serving time on drug charges. (“Everybody looking at me like I’m not invested/Bitch, you know how hard I was stressing?” he raps on “How Much Is Weed,” the jittery track that opened 2023’s excellent Sunburn.)
He’s outlined his journey with sobriety and addiction in his music, all while dealing with loneliness and some highly public breakups. His lyrics dwell on the things that he misses or wishes had gone differently, and How to Quit Smoking circles the same existential anxieties as Fike tries to kick bad habits and own up to mistakes. “I don’t even go up the street for a cup of ice,” he sings on the surprisingly sunny “Pangea.” “If I fuck it up, I’m going back to the hood.” On the dreamy “Cabby,” with Emma Ogierand Love Spells, he admits, “I’m not sanctified, I’m not Jesus Christ/But if this wine was water, I’d feel fit to drive.” It’s especially thrilling to see him pull in different guests across the album; Ogier also appears on the bouncy “Small Town” with Gabriel Jacoby; Grace Ives hops onto the smoky “Honeylove.”
There’s a void as he tries to give up his vices, and Fike is trying to find anything that’ll fill it: past memories, late-night drives, relationships he knows didn’t work out. But a lot of Fike’s songs can feel fleeting, like he’s too itchy to fully sit in whatever emotion he’s conjuring up. He traces a mood and moves on before revealing too much. He’s struggling on “Casting Call,” trying to reconnect with anyone who can help him escape for a while. “I’m sobrie, I’m sobri- I’m sober for right now,” he stammers on the song, suggesting he’s anything but — yet he doesn’t go any further into his turmoil. Most tracks barely hit the three-minute mark; a large majority end up as quick, two-minute sketches.
And yet, even in their brevity, the songs are good, layered, and surprisingly upbeat. The opener, “Wallflower,” welcomes fans right in, with tons of intricate guitar work and rich textures folded into the production, not to mention endlessly catchy ways into each verse. “Squeeze” is infectiously bright; “White Keys” gets stuck in your head immediately. Fike is a particularly good live performer; a lot of these are begging for the gritty makeover he often gives his songs onstage. They’re indebted to alt-rock and especially Weezer, who joined Fike on Sunburn’s standout “Think Twice.”
When Fike does lean into deeper, heavier feelings, he can land a serious gut punch. “Spotlight/Inner Child” closes the album, and it finally lays out everything he’s been searching for a way to say. He sets it up as a conversation with the artist Tay-K, who raps from prison, where he’s serving an 80-year sentence on multiple counts of murder and aggravated robbery. Fike lets it out as he invites him onto the song: “We been moving throughout the world, I just had a son,” he says. “We been touring a lot, I’m feeling disconnected from my home, um/And I’m growing up at the same time/And so it’s just, I don’t know, being 30, the culmination of all these things, being 30/I don’t know where you’re at with life right now/But I’d be curious to hear it.” Tay-K raps about his childhood hardships, his mom, and trying to stay connected to his inner child in his darkest moments. The two of them seem to land on a central idea that Fike sings about earlier in the song: “Whatever happens, up next, I will do my best.” Throughout the losses and grief and tantamount fuck-ups, he finds a way to get through.
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