The freshest, most avant-garde music emerging in the UK rap sphere is coming from East London’s Fakemink, an eccentric cloud rap revivalist. Tethering echoes of Clams Casino to his alien vocal cadence, Mink’s already-dense catalog depicts youthful exuberance and lovelorn solitude with clarity and conviction. He's as much of a workhorse as he is an auteur, with nearly 100 tracks posted to his SoundCloud since late 2023. On “London Life,” a standout from his mixtape, London’s Savior, Fakemink’s 808’s & Heartbreak-adjacent drums knock behind dreamlike synth pads and anecdotes of a desperate romance. “Never seen eyes like the ones on your face/I couldn’t hide what I tried faking,” he raps in his signature chipmunked malaise.
Born in 2005 to an Indian-British father and an Algerian mother, Fakemink grew up in Redbridge, London with a natural anity for music. Years after his father queued up textures of jungle and drum-n-bass as a DJ, his cracked torrent of FL Studio served as an entry point for Mink to start making music at just ten years old. The genre-bending innovation of icons like Ye and Frank Ocean inspired him to turn what started as a passive hobby into a perennial creative outlet—now at 19, he's been making music for more than half of his life. All signs point towards Mink being poised for a groundbreaking future past the connes of his laptop.