Dominic Fike in North America

A guitar screeches like a car skidding off a hillside highway. A prayer to be “cancelled” rings out unapologetically. Melodic odes the finest fried foods, anesthetized Wurlitzer transmissions, and stoned doo wop harmonies fit like puzzle pieces on Dominic Fike’s 2020 full-length debut, What Could Possibly Go Wrong [Columbia Records]. The Florida-born and Los Angeles-based platinum singer, songwriter, guitarist, and producer cobbles together a cohesive vision out of seemingly disparate elements. Reverent of pre-grunge alternative, lo-fi hip-hop, and dream pop (yet wholly defiant of the lines between them), he serves up a searing statement. “I just wanted to make an album,” he exclaims. “The whole process took a lot out of me, but it was worth it. In the past, everything was really short. I finally had to make a full project though. That’s what I tried to do.” He quietly arrived at this realization. Growing up in Naples, Florida, his first memories included listening to Mariah Carey, Lil’ Kim, and the Jackson Five in the car with his mother or while she cleaned the house. Meanwhile, Dominic’s dad bought an old school four-track at a pawn shop for him. “I knew him briefly for a year, and I begged him to teach me some guitar chords,” he recalls. Armed with a “physical audio workstation,” guitar, and mom’s iPad with GarageBand, he went from covering “Fireman” by Lil Wayne to forming a nascent rap collective during high school. In 2018, he captivated a rabid fan base with the Don’t Forget About Me, Demos EP. The single “3 Nights” picked up a platinum plaque and tallied nearly 1 billion streams on its own. Along the way, he assembled What Could Possibly Go Wrong. He left Florida and spent three months in a long cabin in Breckenridge, Colorado. “I’d never seen snow, so I went to Colorado,” he says. “That’s where it started.” Over the next year, Dominic wrote and recorded everywhere from Hawaii and Texas to Europe before finishing in Los Angeles. “I was out there by myse