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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.
Thankfully, most of the songs here have too much juice to falter. The boy who cried terrified is ultimately just that—terrified—but he rides the high of his power trip without looking back. He’s between L.A. and New York throwing guap, eating ice cream cake, and holding sexual tension with doe-eyed girls. At its peak, the music is as madcap as it is nervy, a hyperactive alloy of piercing melodies and whirring bass. The scumbag gusto that mink carries now screams, “I just got rich and you can’t tell me shit,” like on “Dumb,” with razorblade synths that slice through scathing barbs aimed at someone he can’t stand now. But tracks like “The Mercer” maintain that verve while undercutting it with the industry-induced paranoia he’s faced with now. As geeked as he is to make his money, fakemink’s acute fear of failure or selling out is apparent. “I’d kill myself before they ever clone me,” he trills on “Mr. Chow.”
In a way that feels aligned with his past work, the most forlorn elements of the production–the ambling countermelodies of “Mr. Chow,” the sweeping currents that wash over “The Mercer”–are buoyed by agile drumbeats and flows that command movement. (I’m glad that mink worked with close collaborators like cranes, Wraith9, and Moustafax2 to land on a sound that still feels like his own.) On the last song, “fml,” a Burial sample that conjures feelings of loss and regret is met with snaps and fuzzy 808s that provide a sense of warmth. “Maybe I’m a animal, maybe half-human/Life feel like a TV show, Truman,” mink declares on “Young Millionaire,” an undeniably corny opening line that still lands because of what you hear around it: kicks and snares in gleeful lockstep with each other, the resonant strings you’d hear on an early New Order record, plus mink’s boyish vocal harmonies.
Back in 2009, on “Soundtrack 2 My Life,” a then-25-year-old Kid Cudi punctuated his last verse with “‘I am happy’/That’s just the saddest lie,” a line that cut much deeper when I’d play it as an 11-year-old walking through the aisles at Michael’s with my mom than it does now. But despite now being aware of how contrived the song looks on paper, the urgent conviction baked into the production and the performance still resonates with me. “Much of his songwriting is emotionally naked,” The New York Times’ Jon Caramonica wrote of Cudi’s Man on the Moon: The End of Day. “[The] star is reduced to a gaseous nonentity.” To some degree, fakemink’s writing feels similar, as though the immediacy that makes him endearing also makes his sentiment too saccharine to really take seriously. Entertainment Weekly saw MOTM differently: “Cudi turns out to be that rarest of rap phenomena: a hyped upstart who really does represent a promising new phase in the genre’s evolution.” fakemink seems to be cut from that same cloth, flaws and all.
