Dropped alongside his long-awaited EP
Fakemink continues to stir up commotion in the UK underground, and this week he dropped The Boy Who Cried Terrified EP — with “fml.” slipping out a few hours early, acting something like a not-quite-official lead single. The track leans fully into fakemink’s preferred emotional register: detached, irony-soaked despair.
Unsurprisingly, critics and fans are split. On “fml.” specifically, fakemink taps into the melancholic noise-mesh of a Burial sample, filtering bleak dubstep atmospheres through hyper-digital, Gen-Z cloud-rap ennui. It arrives with a proper music video (definitely a first) that feels ripped from a Wong Kar-Wai moodboard — obscure heartache, neon gloom, fakemink pensively half-collapsed in a puddle.
His presence has been great entertainment, constantly provoking discourse as he oscillates between underground martyr and mainstream headache. The Boy Who Cried Terrified already has the critics split, with some calling it “a parody of rap music”. But maybe that’s the point. And while being a totemic underground rap figure to kids who haven’t changed their bedsheets in seven months is arguably a questionable feat, fakemink’s energy is undeniably refreshing — messy, ironic, and fully aware of how sweetly irritating it’s being.
Words by Evita Shrestha
Image courtesy of the artist
