Only months ago, British rapper fakemink was nowhere—firing loosies into the void, smoking at home, recording himself aimlessly walking around and getting hit by a car on IG Live. His comeup has been like a makeover montage: banger every month, cosigns flying nonstop (SZA, Camila Cabello, Jack Harlow). He seems to have bypassed the Hyperpop Daily universe and swung straight for the big leagues. Fans who found him two months ago are crying about people who discovered him last week (after I made a TikTok using one of his songs, a lackey sent me hatemail accusing me of being “a newgen who found mink 29 scrolls ago”).
“MAKKA” is his biggest look yet, a song with the kind of faded radiance that makes it seem like a halcyon indietronica fave. Roused from a yearlong slumber, a wispy Ecco2k floats like a genie over fakemink’s shoulder, singing about a “hole in the room,” an absence marked only by a trail of perfume. It’s the opposite of mink, who’s excitedly in the now, mythologizing himself (“I’m only 20 but it feels like plenty”) while dropping us into a sensorium of pleasures: the syrup seeping through his brain and blood, the blue cool of dancing in the rain, his girl looking like Snow White. Instead of the blushing poetry of his last loosie, “Music and Me,” “MAKKA” is pure wanderlust, with a motorized bike ride of a beat by Mechatok and deer park that’s all finger-plucked guitar and purring bass. There’s a delicious curl to fakemink’s voice as it boomerangs between every rhyme. He’s got the conceptual instincts of a writer and the fried ear of an internet weirdo, enough to please both the SoundCloud underworld and the guys who gripe about Nettspend killing music. It’s destined to be the song of the summer for 19-year-old uni kids living their 2020s version of Skins.
