“Dying isn’t in the plans,” Drake rapped in 2011, and the flex that followed could also have been a complaint: “But neither was making it, and here I am.” That line comes to mind when I think of fakemink, a begrudging superstar who learned his snare patterns from “Headlines,” then wasted little time making headlines of his own. He has called himself the “Eminem of the UK underground,” and his raps are transatlantic and cartoonish: nasally, high-pitched fever dreams, melding the debauched swagger of DJ Escrow with the melodic pop instincts of Drizzy. Though his debut mixtape, the sparse London’s Saviour (2023), seemed boastfully titled, the songs themselves were brooding—among them, the slick “Just Kitten,” whose most memorable line is no longer true: “You think I’m underground,” Mink rapped. “I’m far below.” Three years and over 100 loosies later, he has ascended into the rarefied embrace of runway cameos, A-list co-signs, and your cousin’s For You page. Fakemink is very famous, and he would like to assure us that he is thinking very deeply about it.
But how is he feeling? How is he changing? We still don’t know by the end of Terrified ., his supposedly confessional debut studio album. Tension, not resolution, has long been the marrow of his music, which juxtaposes not only sounds—bloghouse, cloud rap, indie rock, electroclash—but sensibilities: haughtiness and humility, wrestling but never quite resolving, like Beyblades cursed to spin forever. The Fakemink of Terrified . is a conflicted anti-hero; oftentimes, like on the raucous “Rewind,” his layered vocals embody his several selves, the ascetic and hedonist shouting over one another. Even so, this tortured posturing has become restrictive, merely invoking awareness of his position, as if that absolves him of meaningful growth. “I know what will happen to my life,” he shared on a website that went live on release day. “I have crossed a line and have left my own kind behind , the life of a simple man behind.” Like that passage, this dramatic debut album juggles two tenses. Stifled by the terrified child who will shine is a capable star who largely does not.
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For the past several years, Fakemink has forged eclecticism from inner conflict, churning out motley PSAs from the angel and devil on his shoulders. Those tensions reached a tipping point on The boy who cried Terrified ., a prelude whose topographic sprawl—clipping snares, King Night swells, a beautifully morose Burial sample—mapped his troubled mind. Conversely, the self-produced Terrified . places a losing wager: sacrificing the range Fakemink does have to make room for a singular statement he cannot yet make. The result is an overlong album whose monotonous palette—percussive and groggily sleazy, as if Black Kray studied Snow Strippers instead of SALEM—illuminates its struggle to say anything whatsoever. “Rewind” pleads “look at what you made me,” while the doe-eyed “Tell Me What You’re Missing .” insists, “Fuck a co-sign, I did it on my own.” The ruthless mercenary of “Like a Virgin” gets “so much money” that he burns it, but the noble miser of “51 Ttashpel Pony Ave .” swears he’s “making all this money for my fucking kids.” By paring down his eclectic palette, Fakemink reinforces his rigid concept of stardom as a sudden and absolute curse he must begrudgingly accept, rather than gracefully grow into. He is evidently still figuring things out. I wish he would give himself more room to do so.
Fakemink’s crossover appeal is a direct product of his omnivorous taste—is this the same guy who gave us “Pillowfight” and “Training” eight days apart?—and so it feels amiss that the album about his stardom would deny the bug-eyed versatility that earned it. At the same time, Fakemink also thrives with lower stakes, which might partially explain why Terrified . falls short of his freewheeling back catalog. The best songs here sound like loosies, and feel much more relieving than the interludes: “Hard Candy” is a syrupy jolt from the 8-bit universe of Revengeseekerz, while a dead-eyed Mink slides all over “Wrong Relief,” its sparseness anchoring his strongest rapping performance. Nonetheless, these occasional flashes of precocity are outnumbered by banalities—some recurring, like “I got the baddest bitch alive” (“Kiss of Death”; “Forget me Not .”), and others thankfully not recurring, like “I was lost, now I’m found like Nemo.” Terrified is album-as-telescope, a grand attempt to establish Fakemink as a sunlike star. Behold the paranoid, ever-expanding giant. Behold the blemishes, suddenly bigger than they seemed before.
Daniel D`Amico for SANREMO.FM
