Plenty of people turn to punk seeking an escape; Nick Vicario needed distance from the thing itself. As a player in West Coast bands like Crisis Man, Cower, and Public Eye, the Oregon-born musician has spent most of his life abiding by hardcore ethos both onstage and off, for better or for worse. When he relocated to Los Angeles and launched his mostly-solo project Smirk with 2021’s scuzzy, lo-fi LP, he was indulging in the reckless, destructive behaviors that tend to be more alluring in song than in practice. In a breakthrough moment he says came to him as a gradual epiphany rather than a dispatch from rock bottom, Vicario realized drugs had taken too much control over his life. With his third Smirk album, Speculative Fiction, he’s on the side of addiction recovery—but it turns out getting better often comes with its own tempests.
In the years since his previous album, 2022’s Material, Vicario became a husband, a father, and a Connecticut resident. Speculative Fiction somewhat reflects that maturation: Vicario’s latest pushes the boundaries of his scrappy home recordings and, at 43 minutes, runs nearly twice as long as its predecessors, which embraced post-punk revivalism via bite-sized mosh pit-stirrers. With old friends and collaborators like Ceremony’s Ross Farrar among the short list of personnel, Vicario hasn’t taken a total departure from the typical punk roadmap—the raucous headbanger “Cheap Greed,” for example, underscores the ruling class’ role in creating proletariat adversity—but Speculative Fiction takes a step back, slows things down, and uses that extra space to dabble in a larger pool of rock influences. It’s a broad, complicated retrospective of Vicario’s devil-may-care past contextualized within wiser hindsight.
On the reflexive album opener “Greetings,” Vicario reintroduces himself with the apologetic, self-deprecating snark of a party guest who suspects he’s overstayed his welcome: “I still got these themes/Old tropes and schemes/Affliction, terminal addiction/Among other things,” he mulls over buzzing guitars that echo his early heroes Wipers. “So that’s the plan, hope you’ll understand/We’re back by unpopular demand.” Vicario doesn’t delve into too much detail about addiction in the conventional sense—save for maybe “Sistine Junk,” a midtempo groover powered by the anhedonic daze of excessive screen time—but compulsions and emotional crutches loom over tracks like the splashy “Victimry,” where he seems to wake up to the fact that many of the biggest issues he faces are self-imposed. The riff-heavy highlight “Dog Years” wrestles with simultaneous feelings of isolation and reluctance to reach out to friends. “They all say, ‘You’re a waste,’” he recalls on the retro barnburner “I Shall Be Released,” but by the time he arrives at the song’s title, you get the sense he’s ready to prove his doubters wrong instead of yielding to their low expectations.
Major life changes, even the necessary, salvational ones like Vicario’s, rarely come without a layer of grief or doubt. Speculative Fiction smartly navigates those nuances in songs like “Perfect World,” where giving up bad habits for the sake of his own wellbeing resembles humbling growing pains: “A gentle way of life just don’t seem right,” he sneers. “Feeling more uncool every day with time/But them’s the breaks in a perfect world.” But the album’s emphatic centerpiece “Going Off to Die” offers perhaps the most succinct snapshot of Vicario’s quiet turmoil: “I feel strangely at peace/Like an animal going off to die/Everyday I leave something else behind,” he mulls in its sticky chorus, but it’s hardly pessimistic. The sweeping melody and Vicario’s steadfast delivery yield a ceremonious tone, a spiritual death giving way to a much-needed reawakening.