Julyssa Lopez
Contact Julyssa Lopez on X View all posts by Julyssa Lopez November 3, 2026 Add us as a Google Preferred Source
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Sam Balaban* 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 latter of 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 Ogier and 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.”
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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.
