--- title: "Danny Brown joins Dominic Fike on Not the Spirit, a dark deep cut from his album How to Quit Smoking" url: https://badiyaa.com/dominic-fike-danny-brown-not-the-spirit/ published: 2026-11-09T10:23:00+00:00 modified: 2026-11-09T10:23:00+00:00 section: Entertainment publisher: Badiyaa --- # Danny Brown joins Dominic Fike on Not the Spirit, a dark deep cut from his album How to Quit Smoking The Detroit rapper appears on track 13 of Fike's third album, released October 30 through Columbia, and the song digs into a childhood spent broke while the singer heads toward a European tour in February. Danny Brown turns up 13 tracks deep on Dominic Fike’s new album, and the song he lands on is one of the darkest corners of the record. “Not the Spirit” arrived on October 30 as part of *How to Quit Smoking*, the 15-song Columbia Records release that is Fike’s third studio album. It reached listeners as an album cut, not a single. Columbia’s campaign ran on three other songs: “Wallflower” on August 28, “Small Town” on September 18 and “Pangea” on October 19. “White Keys,” out since November 2025, was folded into the tracklist. ## A hard-luck song with a Detroit voice on it Early reviews agree on the mood. Critics describe a grimy, grunge-leaning track built around growing up broke, a change of pace from the album’s sunnier indie-pop. Brown is the steadying element in those accounts, his high-pitched delivery giving the song a rhythm Fike’s own cadence does not always find. The pairing makes more sense on paper than the genre tags suggest. Fike, born in Naples, Florida, in 1995, started out rapping in a local collective before his acoustic-leaning “3 Nights” broke through. Brown, born Daniel Sewell in Detroit in 1981, built his name on the 2011 mixtape *XXX* and the albums *Old* and *Atrocity Exhibition*, then swung toward hyperpop on 2025’s *Stardust*. Fifteen years separate the two men, and that gap works in the song’s favor. Fike is looking back at a rough childhood, and Brown has been making records since 2003, many of them rooted in the Detroit he grew up in. Both have also talked openly about getting sober, which gives an album with this title a second layer. ## Where it sits on the album Track order matters here. “Not the Spirit” opens the closing stretch, followed by “War Machine” and then “Spotlight / Inner Child,” which ends on a recorded prison phone call with the rapper Tay-K. The album’s official notes single out that call as the record’s most unexpected moment, and they list Brown among a guest roster that also includes Emma Ogier and Love Spells. - **Album:** *How to Quit Smoking*, 15 tracks, about 40 minutes - **Label:** Columbia Records - **Guest on track 13:** Danny Brown - **Early peaks:** No. 22 in Australia, No. 11 in New Zealand Most of the writing happened away from a studio, in hotel rooms, greenrooms and on the bus during the North American run of the Comedy Tragedy Parody Tour. That helps explain the album’s stitched-together texture. The bigger commercial story for Fike this year sits elsewhere. His 2018 demo “Babydoll” went viral on TikTok, was reissued in February and climbed into the US top 10, eight years after he first recorded it. Nothing on the new album has matched that so far, and “Not the Spirit” was never positioned to try. Its value is credibility: a respected Detroit veteran vouching for a singer who still gets filed under pop. Fike takes the album overseas next. According to a report on his October tour announcement, the European and UK leg opens February 9 in Düsseldorf and closes March 6 in Manchester. ## Further reading - [Wikipedia: Dominic Fike](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dominic_Fike) - [Wikipedia: Danny Brown](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Danny_Brown) *Image: Thomson200, CC0 via Wikimedia Commons* *This article was produced with AI assistance and reviewed by our Editorial Desk. [How we work](https://badiyaa.com/editorial-policy/).*