The beauty of being a bedroom artist starts with privacy. When I listen to fakemink’s early SoundCloud cuts and his 2023 debut, London’s Saviour, I think of the blackout curtains that were on his windows, the sense of security that must’ve come from performing to an audience of none. Thanks to his singular ear for melody, the drug-tinged reverie that mink has crafted constitutes a world of its own in a landscape where “world-building” has been reduced to a buzzword. Each listen to “Just Kitten” or “Truffle” or “Shampoodle” reminds me of the strange sort of lucid dreams that don’t overwhelm you as much as they trickle into your nervous system and stay there. It’s intimate and intoxicating, spliced with enough playfulness—just look at the song titles—to offset the gloom.
On the opposite side of the coin, the Essex-born rapper-producer presents himself in contradictory ways. You can tell his approach is meant to be open and diaristic because of the way he gestures towards emotion. “Tryna get high, man, I really feel too low,” he spits on his new track “Young Millionaire.” “Turn the other cheek ’cause I know something that you don’t.” But he remains elusive. The trite, unadorned depiction of anguish and the woozy psychedelia it’s packaged in are as deep as the music gets. But that’s also the point. The Boy who cried Terrified ., a short prelude to mink’s upcoming album, Terrified, carries his double-edged sword into slightly new territory. The question is, how much does it really work? The hazy ambiance still feels enthralling, and the goofy asides and luxury vices that provide levity do too. But fakemink finds himself on the other side of fame without much to say about how it makes him feel.
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Last year, in the wake of some internet hype from his SoundCloud loosies, a smash hit called “LV Sandals” shot fakemink’s trajectory to the moon. Alongside Britain’s most popular new hotheads, EsDeeKid and Rico Ace, mink rapped the simplest four bars he probably ever will in his life: “Louis V sandals/Crazy, hoes act scandalous/Yeah, these supermodel bitches be fans/Dropped the pack off to her man, and then I go hold hands with her.”
Between this and his solo electroclash breakout “Easter Pink,” fakemink was catapulted onto TikTok algorithms and festival stages and magazine covers with haste. Goes without saying how many times that “industry plant” conspiracy has been thrown around since. He’s performed alongside Drake and Carti, received plaudits from Timothée Chalamet, and counts Frank Ocean as both a fan and a friend. Not to say he’s suddenly become a household name, but The Boy who cried Terrified . feels like fakemink’s first shot to establish himself in the same canon.
On opener “Blow the Speaker,” mink lies on a bed of thespian strings that cushion his signature pitched-up wail. The mix is cleaner than it has ever been; his voice is pushed to the front. “Running through the night, I feel alone,” he begins, at which I let out a sigh. “I only got my keys, no I ain’t got my phone/Lookin’ for the truth, you say that I’m not alone.” It’s the kind of dull, cookie-cutter scene-setting that’d make the whole track feel like a missed opportunity if the eventual beat drop wasn’t so lively. For better or worse, mink seems more spiritually aligned with (a young) Kid Cudi than he is any other musician: His preternatural knack for genreless ingenuity and alien melody is at risk of being bogged down by his pen at any point.
