fakemink released his second album Terrified . today, May 22, 2026, through EtnaVeraVela. Nineteen tracks, roughly 55 minutes, and almost all of it produced by the Essex rapper himself. By his own account in the run-up, only two songs lean on samples. After a 2023 debut (London's Saviour) and a 2025 that turned him from underground curio into a TikTok fixture sharing festival stages with Drake and Playboi Carti, this is the record meant to prove he can build a world from scratch. He mostly does. We're giving it an 8 out of 10.
The pitch fakemink made before release was a "creepy California noir," a crude caricature of LA rebuilt from warped memory after he'd flown home to London. That framing pays off. Terrified . plays like a horror film scored in a basement: fallen angels in five-star hotels, models trying to steal your soul, vampires steering luxury cars down Hollywood Boulevard. The beats are blown out and gothic, closer to the Castlevania soundtrack turned inside out than to anything on UK rap radio, even as the melodies carry a drill-adjacent lilt. On the witch-housey "Essex Girls .," he frames the whole album's appetite in a single line about one person's poison being another's feast.
There's real architecture underneath the mood. fakemink has described the tracklist as a descent: the opening run indulges the seven deadly sins over low frequencies and ritual drums, then the bottom end slowly burns off until the closer "Etna" arrives with no drums and no bass at all. As a concept that could read as a press-release gimmick. In practice the sequencing earns it. By the time the low end disappears, the record has spent forty minutes making you crave its absence, and the spoken-word interludes (credited, maybe, to the shadowy Tina Temps) thread the noir together without tipping into cosplay.
Where it stretches thin
The ambition is also the problem. Nineteen tracks is a lot of dread to sustain, and the middle stretch sags. A couple of the seven-sins cuts feel like texture more than song, atmosphere doing the work an actual hook should. The "made it all myself" flex is admirable and audible, but a few beats would have benefited from a second set of ears. When the album lands, on "Wrong Relief," on "Night, Blooming Jasmine," on the closer, it's genuinely transporting. When it doesn't, it loops. An 8, not a 9, because the vision outpaces the editing.
Still, this is the rare sophomore album that gets bigger and stranger instead of safer, from an artist who could easily have cashed the breakout in for something cleaner. Terrified . is out now on all platforms.
The reason a record like this even reaches you on the artist's own terms matters. fakemink self-produced almost the entire thing and put it out through a small label, but most artists at his level still hand the math to people they never see: streaming services that pay in fractions of a cent, splits buried in contracts, royalties that surface a quarter late if they surface at all. Signed Trade is building something different. You buy music directly from the artist, with no label middleman and no streaming skim. Every royalty split is public, an open ledger where every dollar from every stream and every sale is traceable. Artists get paid instantly, on every stream and every purchase, not on a quarterly delay. And every track carries a market cap that moves with how it actually performs, so fans can listen and invest in a record's run at once. It isn't live yet. Be early and join the waitlist at https://signed.trade.
