Since his rocket to stardom with the danceable EDM-laden Easter Pink in 2025, UK Rapper Fakemink has been a staple of everyone you know’s TikTok FYP thanks to a slew of catchy hooks, a distinct pitched-up voice and constant invoking of Belgian fashion designer Ann Demeulemeester. Mink’s debut 2023 album London’s Saviour made him concrete in the “UK Underground” scene along with figures like Phreshboyswag and Esdee Kid, the latter of which he collaborated with on the song LV sandals which took over my FYP when it dropped. London’s Saviour was a genuinely exciting project to listen through the first time, featuring self-production that lifted from Imogen Heap, Crystal Castles, and Tina Dico – encasing lush aughties pop beneath the surface of jerk drum patterns. I remember reading around that time that Mink was a big fan of Hackney, London sound sorcerer Dean Blunt, and was brimming with anticipation for a response to the current state of rap that matched the subversiveness that Blunt employed in response/retaliation/riot against the contemporary soundscape and musical attitudes in his Babyfather projects as well as 2014’s Black Metal.
I put that whole scene – the UK Underground – in scare quotes though, cuz there’s really nothing underground about it. The same could be said for the American’s, which fermented Nettspend, Nine Vicious, and Smokedope2016. These are all artists who, more or less, were snatched up by the nu-aristocracy of professional-class trend-hounds to stumble down runways and headline festivals. Plucked outta London apartments and Middle-American Suburbia and injected onto the world stage. The arrested development that being rocket propelled to stardom inflicts on a young mind is well documented; Taylor Swift has this weird obsession with ‘Highschool Love’ ‘cuz she never experienced it, and Michael Jackson slept in a bed with little boys.
With the release of 2026’s Terrified, it seems apparent that the boomtube of popularity has totally drilled into Mink’s head.
The title of the first single off the album is a reference to the late American director David Lynch’s favorite flower or something, and since the renowned director passed last year there’s been a resurgence of people desperate to intellectualize their existence through a ‘Lynchian’ (meaningless) lens, Mink included. From what I can piece together from his ramblings on socials as well as the dreich spoken word pieces that suddenly sneak through monotonous synths and 808s that are bonafide static swampland and a vocal performance that feels totally phoned in and stripped of any life… I think this is Fakemink trying to do a ‘Mulholland Drive’ style tale about rising to fame in Sunny L.A. except that Mink isn’t distanced or introspective enough to make a worthwhile commentary on celebrity lifestyle, and any reaching for a sublime truth about the vacuity of his moment is drowned out immediately by a relishing of stardom.
The contradictory, confused nature of the album’s whole demeanor and lyricism is best exemplified on the track 51 Ttashpel Pony Ave, where Mink raps:
‘Fuck a familiar face, need a familiar place,
with a familiar bitch and that familiar rain.’
What? Does he need a familiar face? Is the familiar bitch the face he fucks? Does our oafus laureate envision a faceless bitch?
Here’s a guy that was invoking Dean Blunt, yet instead of honing his sound into an outlier from the quickly tired formula of his contemporaries, he’s doing fashion runway shows right next to them visibly scared out of his mind. I guess in that regard the most sure part of this album is its title. On Terrified, Mink is just that: Paralysed with fear, he’s sent out a project that might as well have been made by one of his dozens of imitators, entombed in the constraints of a sonic sarcophagus that he cannot escape with all the dirt of the dozens of artworks that this album is a pastiche of keeping the lid weighed shut. Fakemink is another Pop artist.
