Fakemink, British rap’s next big thing, unravels in real time

Fakemink, Terrified

★★★

In the attention economy of the year of our lord 2026, the journey from underground phenom to polarising figurehead runs at a discombobulating hyper-speed. Just ask Fakemink.

The English rapper, real name Vincenzo Camille, has spent the past year-and-a-bit bubbling as the British rap underground’s next big thing, thanks to an unending string of incredible singles – including Easter Pink, Music and Me, and Braces – that fused the distorted crunch of rage-rap with the sugary rush of hyperpop, ’00s indie and Euro-club EDM. Internal conflict (“Would you ever trade your life for desire?” ) and a biblical fixation lent an introspective bent to the tracks and quickly made him an online sensation, earning co-signs from Drake, Frank Ocean, even Timothee Chalamet.

The 21-year-old’s new album Terrified might actually be his second – following his under–the-radar 2023 mixtape London’s Saviour – but it’s effectively his mainstream debut, frantically anticipated following his viral breakthrough.

But when your breakout is already your drug-fuelled “I holed myself up in the Chateau Marmont to make an album about the demoralising effects of celebrity” album, it suggests there’s something fundamentally wrong with a generation’s fame cycle.

Terrified is dark. Even more so than January’s twitchy stop-gap EP The Boy Who Cried Terrified, Fakemink has refined his sound in a colder direction, all but abandoning the melodic bursts that made his singles so gleeful and soul-stirring. Over churning beats, he wallows in debauchery and paranoia, exhaustion, homesickness and spiritual decay, consumed by the confusion that comes with being both publicly revered and reviled.

From the ’Pac referencing All Eyes On Me, set in a Master and Margarita-esque underground ballroom filled with “dog ass witches eating dog food”, to Wrong Relief, where he compares Hollywood to a dungeon, there’s barely a sweet respite here (the colourful synths of Night, Blooming Jasmine arrive like heralds from angels).

There’s some gothic beauty to the darkness – beats skitter and echo somewhere between the broken religiosity of Salem and the gritty dramatics of ’80s slasher films – but it’s unrelenting. Spoken word interludes, including the ballsy seven-minute Fire & Ice, highlight his commitment to a jittery aesthetic vision – it plays like David Lynch narrating a BioShock session on Twitch – but a skip’s a skip. I came for music, not a sad audiobook.

Fakemink has described the album as a journey through Dante’s nine rings of hell, and in an accompanying series of “tales” hosted on a bare-bones website, he espoused further. “Fame is more of a descent rather than ascension, it’s a baptism in attention, a coronation that feels like a curse,” he writes.

A hundred-odd years of pop-culture history from Fatty Arbuckle to Britney Spears already told us this, but sometimes the kids need to figure it out on their own. Hopefully now, revelation in hand, Fakemink finds space to rediscover the joy of making music on his own terms, regardless of the trolls paying attention. Robert Moran

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