Here’s one strategy I forgot in my “finding weird shit” column: Listen to what your younger relatives recommend. fakemink came as a tip from my very tapped-in cousin. I used to play Mario Kart DS with him at family functions and now he’s making beats for yuke and Ja66 and keeping me apprised of what’s happening in the German SoundCloud scene. He sent me some fakemink links in the middle of last year. The Londoner’s voice, pitched up so it’s somewhere between sped-up Lucki and a Galaxy Gas freestyle, sounded slick over every weird ass beat. It could be melted funk on “White Ash” or lattices of glitches like “Thank God”—the regal dryness of fakemink’s bright and crispy voice lent everything a poignant, bittersweet feeling.
A few months later, I edited his first written interview. After flaking on the writer several times, he finally hopped on a call and rambled about sharing a life philosophy with Alexander McQueen and how his jerky snare patterns come not from SoundCloud wizards but Drake’s “Headlines.” When we titled it “fakemink wants to save London rap,” it felt like wishful thinking. How is this random kid with 10,000 monthly listeners supposed to take over?
Now it feels like a prophecy. In July, Drake brought out the 20-year-old during one of his headlining sets at Wireless Festival. fakemink stormed across the mainstage, performing a few of his biggest hits while the crowd of OVO glazers and hungry Brits embraced him like the messiah. fakemink has since racked up an improbable flurry of cosigns. Over the last few days alone, Clairo followed him, Timothée Chalamet posted up at his show at a boxing ring, and Frank Ocean shared photos of him on his Instagram story.
The hype is in overdrive, so much so that people are declaring he’s lost his soul and calling him an industry plant. He’s at the forefront of the British scene—alongside upstarts like Fimiguerrero, Jim Legxacy, YT, and Len—but also quickly surpassing it, primed for global crossover. How did we get here, and is this 20-year-old Drake and Dean Blunt diehard worth the fanfare?
In the early days, before he was fakemink, he was 9090gate. He smoked weed and recorded music from a bedroom crammed with knickknacks and guarded by blackout curtains. He filmed Instagram Lives, including one where he got hit by a car. Over the last couple of years, he has slowly developed a style he calls “dirty luxury”: think food stains on a $10,000 t-shirt. It’s not a super original concept—opulent grime has been the ethos of countless MCs from Rocky to Lone. He wants to give it a fresh spin with his own production and beats from some of the most exciting oddballs in the underground, like deer park, cranes, Yurkiez, mag, and reklus1ve. “Bambi,” produced by prblm, conjures up a drunken walk home at 3 a.m. with rain drizzling lightly over your head. Others like “Bite My Lip” and “Crush” have a deliciously decayed shimmer that makes them feel like 2000s prom hits from an alternate dimension. fakemink’s one of a few in this corner of the underground who writes out lyrics ahead of time instead of punching in fragmented bursts. As a result, his vocals have a kind of stately yet starry-eyed quality, giving structure to these deformed, cosmic beats from the internet abyss. It reminds me of the way Takeoff’s unvarnished tone anchored his Migos partners’ Auto-Tuned warbles.
The delightful curl of his voice makes simple hooks tickle the ear, as on “Kacey Lola,” which sounds like an ode to an it girl but is actually a tribute to the benzo medication Ksalol. But his best moments ditch the ennui and open up. “I'm sorry to all the bitches that I know I'm leadin' on/If you need a shoulder to cry on, I'll give you one,” he confesses on “Baklava” over a beat that samples Camera Can’t Lie’s “Losing You” and feels like jacuzzi bubbles in the brain. “It's sad 'cause I know that we will never ever hug again/Never ever fuck again, no, we'll never kiss again.”
His best music has a tortured spiritual tension: “Addicted to this money like it's porn, man, I need it,” he cries on “Loser Monologue.” On maybe his most intoxicating song to date, “Music and Me,” fakemink wrestles between material decadence and an ascetic lifestyle, which fans interpreted as an internal struggle he’s going through as a Muslim. “Would you ever trade your life for desire?” he raps breathlessly, seemingly unsure of the answer. He isn’t a philosopher, but his jaded yet joyous internal monologues hit for a generation of kids who, as fakemink groans on the shivery “Zealousy,” feel “always so fried” and “never know why.”
His rise has really accelerated in the last few months, trampolined by hits like “LV Sandals” with EsDeeKid and Rico Ace, the frayed bloghouse bounce of his and Suzy Sheer’s “Easter Pink,” and “MAKKA,” a collab with Ecco2k and Mechatok that’s like a Skins theme for the 2020s. There has been no full-length project since his 2023 mixtape London’s Saviour, just a relentless streak of loosies.
His shtick isn’t too radical when you zoom out. Part of the appeal certainly comes from the popular notion that there’s been a void of new rap megastars in the younger generation, and the disdain some people have for “empty” SoundCloud rap pyrotechnics. fakemink satisfies both the oldheads and the new-gens, the moshpit NPCs and the technical obsessives. In Drake's case, he's clearly latching onto whatever he thinks is cool as an attempt to stay relevant. Like his idol Dean Blunt, it can at times feel like fakemink’s coasting off enigmatic rawness; hooks like "Terrified, feel it under your skin/How much of yourself are you gonna lose 'til you win?" gesture at depth without going much further than vague aphorisms. People perceive him as thinking hard about every decision he makes, but he recycles a lot of the same lyrical tropes—about striving, winning, being existentially confused. Maybe his self-professed homebody nature means he doesn’t have many stories to tell, just the flexes and aspirations swirling in his brain. It remains to be seen whether this is his ceiling or if he’s able to shape a full vision out of the two sides of his sound—the introspective depth of earlier music like London's Saviour with the glinting adrenaline of his latest single “Braces.”
On X, he regularly writes “Today Is My Favourite Day,” along with encouraging exhortations to appreciate every little moment. He seems like the kind of guy to unironically post “Live Laugh Love,” someone almost excruciatingly aware of the passage of time, keen to squeeze every second for all its worth. “For 8 years I performed to an audience of none, My biggest fan was my laptop screen. Believe in yourself for 10 years n see where it takes you,” he wrote the other week. Disney-style optimism is an attractive trait for someone in a generation wracked by doom and anxiety. I hope the industry doesn’t suck the passion out of him.