“I was so glad they were gone when I came down,” he says. “I’m standing in this Hollywood crib at seven 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, was up late last night working on songs, which he says isn’t unusual; he’s up late most nights working on songs, especially now that his days are filled with the labour of drumming up interest in his new album, Sunburn, which came out in July 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.

Pop stardom 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.

Yet, 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 album, What Could Possibly Go Wrong, that it 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.”

Fike grew up in chaotic circumstances in sunny Naples, Florida, the son of an African-American father and a Filipino mother, both of whom spent time on drugs, in jail or otherwise unavailable to parent.

He learned to rap with friends and learned to play guitar by watching YouTube; one of his key influences was the Red Hot Chili Peppers’ John Frusciante, whose face now covers Fike’s right hand in tattoo form.

In high school, he started putting music on the internet to local acclaim but later ended up behind bars after he was charged with battery of a police officer during an altercation between the officer and Fike’s younger brother.

The good things about jail, he says, were the regular meals and the regular sleep schedule; the bad things were being cold all the time and being “treated like trash every day” by guards he described as ruthless.

As it happens, “3 Nights” took off on SoundCloud around this time, which set off a bidding war among labels that seemed none too bothered by the fact that he was imprisoned. (Columbia Records signed him.)

“I had a pretty good idea of what it would do to the story,” Fike says. “It’s not perceived as a bad thing like it used to be. I mean, depends on why you’re in, obviously. Nobody’s giving a US$4 million record deal to a paedophile. But mine was hitting a cop, bro. People were like, ‘He’s a bada**.’”

Looking back on his work on Euphoria, Fike says he was “pretty messed up” while shooting the series’ second season, which didn’t prevent his performance from drawing admiring reviews.

Fike, who says he’s sober at the moment, is due back for Euphoria’s third season, about which he seems ambivalent.

“I haven’t seen those people in a while,” he says of his castmates. “You know how sometimes when you want to change, you need to refresh your whole friend group? Feels like moving backwards on that front.”

Perhaps doubly so given the presence of a former romantic partner?

“Oh yeah,” he says, pretending that Schafer’s part in the series hadn’t occurred to him. “That should be fun.”