Dominic Fike is fine. He is fine with being back in his hometown of Naples, FL, after Hollywood didn’t need a reason to make him think he looked bigger than he was. He is fine with not pretending his newest album Sunburn isn’t anything other than a scattered collection of old loose tracks. He is fine with having made it out of the dirt, the hardship, and the struggle—rags to riches, felony conviction included. He is fine with survival’s guilt. Where Kendrick Lamar famously pained himself to explain “How Much a Dollar Cost“, Fike’s rebuttal stops at the otherworldly hive mind of “How Much Is Weed?“. He is fine with being a prodigal lonewolf amidst a tragically golden generation—he’s fine even with BROCKHAMPTON being no more.

Proudly and defiantly an anti-concept album, Sunburn is the 27-year old American singer-songwriter and actor’s second major label project, after instigating a cut through bidding war amongst several record companies from behind the cold confines of his penitentiary cell during the latter end of the last decade—with Columbia Records emerging victorious in 2018. So unlike his 2020 genre-mashing debut What Could Possibly Go Wrong, his latest is a warm, fun, and summer-winking compilation of disparate material, stemming from pretty much the same writing sessions as its predecessor. The lightness and effortlessness with which Fike almost dismisses his current excitement amidst Sunburn‘s promotional run, is refreshing at the very least.

Counterintuitively, that is part of what makes this beach mixtape so good. While some might still file it as a byproduct of cool cold-bloodedness, the former SoundCloud rap sensation’s indifference toward stoking fabricated enthusiasm by over-marketing the 15-cut LP actually makes way for the music to speak for itself. It’s not like one could forcibly blame Dominic, either. Almost every record on the Jim-E Stack-assisted sophomore outing dates back to about three years ago. At least a few of them have been floating around the deep Fike lore and ether since 2021, in either live or teaser form. And to think that the eclectic and sticky third lead single “Mona Lisa” wasn’t even written with the album in mind (initially previewing as OST crown jewel as part of Spider-Man: Across the Spider-Verse).

There’s an evident sense of appeasement and resolve in watching the former jailbird and victim of class feudalism speak and carry himself today—frankly, that’s something all of us can count as a dub. Fike exhumes a kind of seasonality and weariness that betrays both his young age and spotless babyface, one that only someone whose adolescence was stripped away by crime, addiction, and poverty-stricken milieus could possibly sport. Much like so many other burdened by similar disenfranchisement, Dominic turned to music for salvation. Owing to such a coping mechanism, he’s now proudly and nonchalantly wearing some of those late Nineties/early Noughties creative influences on his tattooed sleeves.

Thusly, it shouldn’t come as a blistering surprise that tasteful and breezy “Think Fast” at number three on the record sees a loud and loaded co-sign from none other than Weezer‘s Rivers Cuomo—with a true blue interpolation of the Los Angeles pop punk giants’ “Undone — The Sweater Song“, no less. Or that the elusive and catchiest number on Sunburn, “Frisky“, somehow succeeds at pouring out evident echoes of early 00s Black Eyed Peas mixed with Red Hot Chili Peppers. Meanwhile, the overrated and overproduced sensual pop of Justin Timberlake is an undeniable inspiration on “Bodies” halfway through the mixtape. Yet again, fourth lead single teasing the full release “Mama’s Boy” betrays ephemeral Strokes fingerprints all over its instrumental canvas. Get the point?

Dominic Fike is fine with staying true to himself, and not cracking under the ostracizing major label pressure of unnecessarily sugarcoating something that for him, truly, is passé. He is fine with some of his stans’ para-social behavior, stretching as far as digging up a whole other album‘s worth of unreleased material online. He is fine with understanding the subtle and nuanced specifics of latter day capitalism’s diminishing returns, letting the spate of irresistible hooks on the title track and “Dark” speak on his behalf instead. He is fine with reverting home and providing for his mother and siblings, now that he’s a multi-millionaire with a lot more music in the can. Music he’s actually psyched to talk about.

Perhaps Fike’s most telling and poetic middle finger to retrograde major circuit antics has got to be the way he (mis)handled the inclusion of groovy funk-rap standout “Mona Lisa” into Sunburn. Originally released as a standalone single attached to the theatric release of the eponymous blockbuster movie in early June, the cut was also naturally made available as part of the deluxe version of Metro Boomin’s watertight Presents Spider-Man: Across the Spider-Verse soundtrack album. At least this was the case for about a month. That is, on release day (7th July), the number inexplicably disappeared from Metro Boomin’s OST tracklist (although astute bloodhounds might still dig up idle versions with it on Spotify), only to mysteriously pop up on the 15-track version of Fike’s latest LP again—notably missing from his original 14-track issue.

While adding, removing, and switching individual tracks around on varying iterations of album sequences is nothing new per se in the modern streaming age, alas, one can’t but smile in schadenfreude at the thought of spree of Columbia record executives’ headaches and the wealth of eyebrows raised as Fike urged them to reinstate the track on his own solo project—probably invoking some right of first refusal last minute. One that scrambled lawyers had to hastily retrofit amidst consulting and negotiating with a plethora of sub labels, all contracted by Spider-Man soundtrack’s curator Republic Records. And we all know Sony Music Entertainment (Columbia) and Universal Music Group (Republic) aren’t exactly best friends. Yeah well, Dominic Fike is fine with all of that.

We’d like to thank you sincerely for taking the time to read this and we hope to feel your interest again next time.

AV