When Dominic Fike landed in Los Angeles in late 2018 — this was after he got out of jail in his native Florida and after a brief spell in Colorado, where he went because he’d never seen snow — the musician and actor with the tattooed babyface moved into a nouveau riche mansion in the Hollywood Hills.

“The rent was like 30 grand a month,” he recalls. “It was ridiculous and disgusting. We called it the Porn House.”

Fike, whose good looks and dirtbag charisma earned him a multimillion-dollar record deal before he’d even dropped so much as a major-label single, threw a New Year’s Eve party that year that attracted “some kids who were acting out,” as he puts it — meaning one of them had punched his manager in the face, which led Fike to charge downstairs wielding a knife only to discover that the troublemakers had split.

“I was so glad they were gone when I came down,” he says now. “I’m standing in this Hollywood crib at 7 in the morning. People are on acid. What was I gonna do with the knife?” He laughs wearily. “I was like, ‘I should move.’”

Fike, 27, tells this story on a recent morning while smoking a cigarette next to the pool at his current rental in Laurel Canyon. Shrouded by trees and set back from the street, the place is smaller than Fike’s previous digs, with a white-brick fireplace and tasteful light-wood floors. An assortment of sugary cereals lines the kitchen counter; out back is a set of weights he says he uses daily with a trainer.

The dining table is heaped with recording equipment: laptop, guitar, speakers, mixing console. There’s also a copy of Allen Ginsberg’s “Howl” that an ex-girlfriend just gave him. He was up late last night working on songs, he says, which wasn’t unusual; he’s up late most nights working on songs, especially now that his days are filled with the labor of drumming up interest in his new album, “Sunburn,” which came out earlier this month and which offers a moving portrait of someone trying to figure out how his past keeps shaping him.

After a stretch spent focused on acting — most notably in HBO’s sex-drenched teensploitation drama “Euphoria,” in which he plays a stoner named Elliot who gets involved with both Zendaya’s Rue and Hunter Schafer’s Jules — the singer and rapper who broke out with the bouncy “3 Nights” has recommitted himself to music, so much so that he’s already toiling away on his next record. His next two records, in fact.

The only question is: Does Fike want to be a pop star?

The job certainly seems to be his for the taking. Like a streaming playlist come to life, “Sunburn” blends crunchy alt-rock guitars, squiggly synth licks and Fike’s luscious beach-bro vocals in a genre-blurring way that makes perfect sense to Gen Z. He’s got songs in the new “Spider-Man” and “Barbie” movies and appeared in Bad Bunny’s “Where She Goes” video alongside Frank Ocean and Lil Uzi Vert. At April’s Coachella festival, Fike — who says his “most authentic songs” revolve around his “relationship with the guitar” — performed for an enormous crowd that seemed to squeal every time he flipped his mop of curly brown hair. (He loved Ocean’s much-criticized Coachella set, by the way: “Best live show I’ve ever seen in my life,” he says. “I thought we were all gonna walk away with the same reaction, then I check online and people are just being animals.”)

Whatever it is that powers modern stardom — whatever it is that powered old-fashioned stardom, for that matter — the slouchy, sleepy-eyed Fike’s got it. Says Weezer frontman Rivers Cuomo, who appears on the new album’s “Think Fast,” which interpolates Weezer’s mid-’90s “Undone (The Sweater Song)” into a folky-grungy confession about quitting a toxic situation: “He’s one of the few people I’ve mentioned at home — ‘Oh, I’m going to the studio with Dominic Fike today’ — where my 16-year-old daughter was like, ‘Are you kidding?!’”

Yet to hear Fike tell it, the experience of celebrity in the digital age has turned out to be deeply bewildering for a guy who can’t help but read the comments. “If I want to, I can access something (expletive) about myself in like two seconds,” he says, sprawled in a patio chair in jeans and an artfully ripped T-shirt over a long-sleeve thermal top. “That’s (expletive).” Adulation is just as disorienting, he adds: Gazing out at a throng of fans who’d assembled last month for an impromptu album playback in New York, Fike couldn’t stop wondering what they saw in him.

He’s particularly vexed by the demand that, as a public figure, he set a kind of behavioral example. “Everything’s a morality contest these days,” says Fike, who was roasted online in 2022 after he told an audience he’d been fantasizing about being beat up by Amber Heard. “There are people still keeping the old ways: ‘He’s human, he’s flawed, we get it.’ They’re just not voicing it as much as the other people.”

Fike never scrutinized musicians’ words or deeds when he was younger? “It was just different back then,” he says. “Kanye would come on and my mom would be like, ‘That guy’s a (expletive),’ and then we’d keep the song playing — like, ‘This (expletive) slaps, though.’”

As much as he longs for the days before cancellation loomed, there’s something indelibly of-the-moment about Fike’s career, which has relied less on hit songs than on a general vibe disseminated across recordings, gigs, TV and social media. Indeed, the commercial success of “3 Nights,” which topped Billboard’s Alternative Airplay chart, set up expectations for his 2020 debut, “What Could Possibly Go Wrong,” that the album inevitably failed to meet. Three years later, “Euphoria” — on which Fike’s character plays off his real-life persona as a druggy but soulful musician — seems to have put him in a stronger position ahead of “Sunburn’s” release.

Which isn’t to say he disavows the importance of “3 Nights.” “It’s fun — the kids turn up, which is what they’re there for,” he says of performing his big hit in concert. “It’s always somebody’s birthday.”