Sunburn by Dominic Fike | Album Review
Dominic Fike is a quintessential “location artist,” basing his image, lyrics, and sound on his hometown of Naples, Florida. The Naples references are ample throughout his discography, and one can track Fike’s growth through his evolving reflections upon Naples. Fike’s earlier work, in many ways, sounds like the conflicted poetry of a dispirited early-20s Gen-Z, simultaneously romanticizing the intimacy and grime of his hometown and longing to get out of it. On his 2020-track “Florida,” Fike describes the town through attachment and awareness, with lyrics like, “I done took a L on every corner like a swastika,” and “Every kid with me grew together, I’m proud of us / From a sunken place to the top.” Fike’s observations about Naples paint an image of deprivation mixed with sentimentality.
Fike, however, seems to have returned to Naples on his sophomore album with a new set of eyes, having finally escaped his hometown and seen the world. He returns almost with the eyes of a tourist, seeing Naples a bit more through its beaches than its street corners. And, in this way, he also looks at his own past with more separated, fonder reflections. He pokes fun at his Naples prison sentence in the musical theater-tinged single “Dancing in the Courthouse,” singing, “Put ’em on trial, / Make ’em dance for it in the courthouse, / Make a stand for it or it don’t count.” On Weezer-assisted “Think Fast,” he remembers an old romance without the emotional weight of recency, singing, “Those times we shared, they’re yours alone / And when I’m dead, we’ll all go home / This place to me was everything.” Fike is kinder to his old self now, even if only because he resents his new life more than the simpler one he gave away.
Fike’s been busy since last we heard from him. Since his 2020, mid-pandemic release of What Could Possibly Go Wrong, a genre-shifting, surprisingly ruminative, and often soft debut album, Fike secured his first major acting gig as Elliot on the second season of HBO’s biggest-talker Euphoria, performed his first Coachella set, and collaborated with many major artists, including Justin Bieber, Remi Wolf, and a feature on the forthcoming Barbie soundtrack. He also struggled with substance abuse throughout the whole three year musical gap, revealing in a recent interview with Apple Music’s Zane Lowe that he was practically cut from Euphoria when he often showed up high to filming. Fike’s life before releasing his first album hardly resembled his life now, making this album’s themes and sound hard to anticipate pre-release. But fame and career largely evaded this album’s moodboard, and the intimate life of a downcast Floridian remains Fike’s muse on his fresh new album, Sunburn.
The majority of Sunburn’s 15 tracks describe relationships, in both past and present tense, which Fike has been in since 2020. Though Fike was previously romantically linked to his Euphoria co-star Hunter Schafer, the couple recently called it quits, and the album does not read as the tale of a man deeply in love. Fike is bouncing around in life and is a keen observer, identifying small moments in relationships and little quotes and qualities from ex-lovers and relatives which serve as microcosms of the greater mystery. He doesn’t overanalyze, but presents short stories which could easily mean nothing to the casual onlooker, though he suggests there’s more here to see.
“Pasture Child” is a sweet, standout track about a former “half-Dakota, half-Louisiana” love affair which fizzled due to a lack of wifi and, therefore, ability to keep the long-distance fling going. On it Fike sings, “She wrote a book, I wasn’t in it,” and “I still pretend to hold her against me, / Way back before you went digital” to reveal his insecurity in the relationship’s inequality. Though he was fully engaged in the relationship, he couldn’t make her love him enough to “go digital,” though she eventually did, or even show up as a character in her book. This not-fully-loved feeling around his failed relationships recurs over the album often, including on “4x4” and “What Kinda Woman,” two of the album’s most poetic and emotional moments.
Fike often grapples with dependency and addiction on the record. He tells these tales about people more than substances, though one could make a case that he personifies the substances he’s using across the tracks. On “Bodies,” Fike deals with dependency issues and needing his lover to always be around him, which leads him to trust implicitly, though maybe only by suppressing distrust. He sings, “I kinda struggle when I think about the past / But it’s in the past, so I guess I try not to ask… One time for all of your bodies from college / One more for every boy that came before me.” On “7 Hours,” Fike tries to prove his investment through his willingness to make a 7-hour drive to visit his partner at any time, as if that level of commitment should be enough to win her affection. It seems like Fike is struggling with a lack of groundedness right now, and any feeling of home pulls him in quickly… maybe a bit too quickly. Though the rockstar lifestyle is not an explicit album theme, it’s certainly an underlying storyline.
Despite his astute ruminations and deep insights, Fike doesn’t seem to be taking life too seriously yet. He still has a boyish charm which occasionally cedes into an underlying fear of the future and lack of command over his own agenda. His uncertainty about the future may explain his inability to seriously plan a life with one partner. On “Think Fast,” Fike repeats “Think fast, you only get one try / Sleep tight, I wanna get sunshine,” before revealing more candidly, “I think life is a gamе, I’m just playing along. / I had something to say then forgot what it was.” Later, on the album’s title track, Fike sings on the song’s pre-chorus, “When I die, baby, lay me in the sun.” There’s no great drive in Fike to figure out the future, but he wants to make good use of the one life he has. He knows what he wants the end to look like, an image of glory laying out on a Naples beach. But the middle is much less certain.
(Even the release cycle of the album had a not-so-serious attitude: Sunburn had an ultra-traditional rollout of singles announced via one or two social media posts. There was no great outreach beyond the fanbase or promotion for the charts. Not the label’s highest expectations, one may assume.)
What Could Possibly Go Wrong made it clear that Fike is not genre or sound-specific. He can bounce and float with ease, though the initial album’s tracks can be roughly divided into two categories: upbeat, lighthearted rock-influenced tracks, and slower, more experimental and emotional tunes. In this album, Fike increases the upbeat rock style song-count and largely replaces the slower, electronic tracks with a new category to great success: acoustic guitar-driven, sit-around-and-jam songs. Through the mid-section of the album, the tracks begin to resemble each other, but not in a monotonous way. Each track presents a different story or base line-placement which makes the album, more than any other descriptor, cohesive. But the real beauty of this album is its jive. Almost all of the songs are fun, bouncy, and imbued with a 90s-pop, sun-worshiping sound, a note reminiscent of Lorde’s recent Solar Power, which also describes a minutely-detailed personal life with a backdrop of fame and an eye to the weather. Fike may even be more successful in his solar integration, making a purely modern sound out of the retro references.
“Why,” the standout track on What Could Possibly Go Wrong, was a loner on that album, a snippet from a certified punk rocker stripped of unnecessary gimmicks. Fike seems to have taken note of the track’s fan-favoritism, as a more punk rock sound takes focus on this album, especially on the standout second single, “Ant Pile.” The song, which describes Fike’s teenage relationship with a (former?) lover who he met in first grade, has a rebellious excitement to it, a fervor for changing a girl’s mind and making memories from bad dates and worse movies. Leading into the final chorus, Fike sings, “I’ve seen you fall to pieces, / Seen you completely naked / There’s no more ways you can surprise me since you looked at me different / And held me like you missed me.” It’s moments like these, where Fike strips back his usual cynicism and penchant for an unhappy ending, that present Fike as more than just an overthinking observer. Some songs surprise you by just how hopeful Fike can be. This artist isn’t totally predictable.
Fike also has more songs on this album where he solely raps, and his talent as a quick-spitting MC is quite a surprise (he’s rapped on previous tracks, but his rap skills have never taken the spotlight as strongly as they do here). The rap-based tracks are Fike’s most confessional. He lyricizes in a stream-of-consciousness style on album-opener “How Much Is Weed?” about resenting family trauma and feeling isolated as a child, with the chorus analogizing his meditations to looking at a “photo album, but the color faded from it.” He returns to this style during the late-album track “Dark,” which dives into a more raging mind. While these tracks differ sonically from most of their companions on the record, they bring in an entirely new sound which Fike seems to be having fun with, adding to the album’s creativity and lightness in a counterintuitive way.
Sunburn is a sunkissed next chapter in Fike’s record collection, and his newfound penchant for beach vibes and jamming along is welcome to Fike fans wishing to dig more into his playful side. The music is more reliably fun now. Critics of Fike’s first LP claimed it had too many skips and forgettable tracks. Fike has found confidence in his sound on Sunburn and uses this confidence to distinguish himself instead of relying too heavily on gimmicky production (though “Mama’s Boy”, a late-album track, very nearly proved this sentence null and void through it’s over-emphasis on corny sonic gimmicks).
Fike hasn’t found security in his lifestyle or in himself yet, but his sound is starting to find a very happy medium. Maybe he can take some solace in that as he continues his career-ascension and embarks on his upcoming tour, equipped with plenty of danceable new songs.
Final Rating: 8.1/10
Favorite Tracks: Ant Pile, Think Fast, 7 Hours, Dancing in the Courthouse, Bodies, Sunburn, Frisky
