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 recovery — but it…