On fakemink’s Terrified. LA Warps Into a Gothic Fever Dream

There is nothing documentary about fakemink’s Los Angeles. The London rapper-producer spent a brief run there in 2025, played his first North American shows, then flew home and let the city rot into memory. Terrified . is what came out: 19 tracks of warped, gothic rap that feel less like a diary and more like a crude caricature sketched from a bad dream. It is his second album, following a fast rise from UK underground oddity to a viral name with cosigns, and it lands with a strange, strobe-lit confidence. Apple Music calls it a “beautiful nightmare” and “creepy strobe-lit California noir,” which is about right, but it also misses the album’s hot, reckless pulse.

The record is entirely self-produced. fakemink handles rhythm, vocal melodies, and sound design, treating production as part of the narrative. The beats are blown out and soaked in distortion, like a Castlevania soundtrack played through cracked speakers. On “Night, Blooming Jasmine .” the low end rumbles while a synth line flickers like a dying neon sign. “Forget me Not .” has a percussive clatter that feels almost industrial before it dissolves into a warped vocal hook. Across the album, horror-game synths and muffled 808s create a claustrophobic atmosphere, but fakemink never lets the dread become suffocating. There is always a melody pulling you forward, a sticky, romantic-gothic sensibility that keeps things from collapsing into pure noise.

Compared to his 2023 debut London’s Saviour and the earlier EP The Boy who cried Terrified ., this album is more thematically tight. The EP was jittery and knowingly internet-brained, happy to fragment. Terrified . still splinters, but it follows a loose arc. fakemink has talked about structuring it around Dante’s Inferno, a descent through circles of glamour, vice, and self-mythology. You can hear that on “Etna .”, which opens with a chant-like sample and builds into something both menacing and strangely celebratory. The track feels like a threshold. On “Kiss Of Death,” his voice sits high in the mix, half-sung, half-rapped, as if he’s narrating his own fall without flinching.

Vocally, fakemink stays slippery. His delivery can shift from a mumbled croon to a bark in the space of a bar. He doesn’t go for big, chest-thumping hooks; instead, he laces the tracks with phrases that repeat until they feel like nervous tics. “Rewind” is built around a single melodic line that warps and twists, the production getting scratchier as it goes. “Playlist .” is almost tender by contrast, a softer moment that lets the album breathe before it plunges back into distortion. These tracks aren’t singles. They function more as scenes, each one a distorted snapshot of a city that never quite comes into focus.

What’s unusual is how Terrified . turns distance into an aesthetic asset. fakemink isn’t trying to recreate LA. He’s rebuilding it from London, through memory and myth, and the inaccuracies are the point. The album feels like looking at a photo that’s been overexposed and ripped at the edges. There’s a quote from a Dazed interview where he talks about the title as “extreme terror running through your veins, going like 100 mph when you’re driving, but it feels so good that you might crash and it doesn’t even matter.” That sensation runs through the whole record. The terror isn’t just threat—it’s a kind of high.

As a self-contained statement, Terrified . is fakemink’s most convincing project yet. It doesn’t try to flatten his eccentricities for a bigger audience, but it also doesn’t retreat into pure obscurity. Tracks like “Etna .” and “Kiss Of Death” have a clarity that suggests he knows exactly what he’s doing when he pushes toward something more structured. There’s growth here, not toward the mainstream, but toward a sharper version of his own sound. The album ends without resolution, as if the descent just continues somewhere else, and that feels right. fakemink isn’t offering redemption, just a ride you might not walk away from.