Fakemink

Basildon was built, almost from scratch, as a reaction to the death and destruction of World War II. Britain needed new towns, and it was hoped they would create new people. Basildon was imagined as a place where light, air and concrete would produce a better kind of life. Instead, it’s an expanse of flatness and weather-beaten, low-rise shopping precincts. It is definitively and unromantically suburban.

I walk through the centre of the town. There is a Wetherspoons named for Sigered, the last king of Essex. There is Brooke House, a brutalist tower block that is not quite interesting enough to be described as monolithic, raised on elegant, white legs above the town centre, and that has been empty for the last six months, uninhabitable because of flooding. Half lost, I check Google Maps, which reveals a park just to the south named for Wat Tyler, leader of the Peasants’ Revolt that pillaged its way through Kent and Essex and into London in the late 14th century, in an England exhausted by plague and by the Hundred Years’ War with France.

“I really do love Essex more than London,” he says, sitting down. “Having a place like Basildon to come back to, especially from LA or Paris, it’s like heaven. Most of the time no one really bothers me here, but it’s starting. When I was heading to the train station a week ago, there were three 14-year-old girls screaming, ‘Oh my God, it’s Mink.’ I just kept on walking.” The day before we meet he was in Paris, at men’s fashion week, where he saw the Comme des Garçons Homme Plus show. He was sat across from Michèle Lamy. “I saw her mouthing the words to a song, and I laughed – like, laughed out loud – and she gave me a death stare. But it was fun, it was cool.”

We pile our plates full of spring rolls, prawn toast, chow mein, lemon chicken, sweet-and-sour sauce, fried chicken wings. Fakemink is the leading voice and most interesting personality in what, in the last few years, has come to be broadly referred to as the UK underground rap scene: an amalgamation of the dreamy, reverb-drenched production of cloud rap retooled for the UK, with its history of grime and UK drill. Whereas as grime and its off-shoots were definitively metropolitan, the new underground scene is dispersed and regional and full of intoxicating youthful DIY potential, in the way punk or rave were in the ’70s and ’90s.

The music Fakemink makes is raw and exuberant, uncommercial and experimental. It sounds destroyed and remade, with off-beat drums and pitched-up vocals – music made alone, at night, on a laptop, and full of the energy, earnestness and ambition of youth. Lyrically, he sketches a restless dream of the big city seen from a Basildon bedroom: a glossy aspiration of designer clothes, model girlfriends, joyful consumption, comedowns and melancholy. For all the swagger there’s an inward psychological framing; fantasy, faith and guilt are all part of the same struggle to define himself without losing his soul. There’s a tender yearning to belong, undercut by embarrassment, self-awareness, humour, withdrawal.

A few months ago he moved out of the home he’d grown up in and into his own place nearby. The house has three bedrooms. In two, he’s put mattresses: one for him and one for his friend and collaborator, Rosh, aka GhostInnaFurCoat, to sleep on. They’ve turned the third, and biggest, room into a home studio, where they’ve been working on Mink’s upcoming second album, ‘Terrified’. In a few days, on what will be his 21st birthday, he will release a mixtape, ‘The Boy Who Cried Terrified’, which will function as something of a prelude to the main album.

He plays me songs from ‘Terrified’, which is almost finished, off his iPhone, and talks me through the ideas that have formed the album. It’s the story of the last six months of his life, spent in LA, New York and Toronto. It’s also about a journey from hell to heaven.

“I was in LA for a month and a half, staying at the Chateau Marmont. I think it’s haunted,” he begins. “I tried to make music in LA, recording in my hotel room, but it was so distracting. When I came home and opened the files I made there, they sounded so amateur. Since I’ve been back in Basildon, I’ve been able to really focus and refine my work. I’m big on environment, and I’m also big on making excuses for myself. If anything is slightly off, I’ll use it as an excuse not to work. So I’ve been trying to eliminate every excuse: having the right drinks, a couple of packs of cigarettes, wearing the right clothes. I have to get a haircut before recording. I don’t want to be recording and thinking that my hair looks wrong.”

The album is roughly based around Dante’s ‘Divine Comedy’, both sonically and in narrative. Treating life like an epic poem “makes all the sadness feel meaningful, all the turmoil feel captivating,” he says. “I’ve always lived like that. Especially the last year when I’ve been in LA and New York. It felt like I was meeting all these biblical archetypes.” For Mink, Basildon is heaven, where LA was hell, the depths of the Inferno. He describes a town full of demonic characters who wanted a piece of him. He had to work through it to get back home, Basildon Paradiso.

“I’ve known GhostInnaFurCoat since 2016,” he says. “He joined our school in Year 6. Then we were supposed to go to different secondary schools, and we did, but his mum once gave him £5 for the vending machine, he lost it, and she thought he was being bullied. So she moved him to my school, but I didn’t know. One day he just walked into my art class, and I couldn’t believe it. We’ve been friends ever since. We’ve never had an argument that didn’t get resolved in ten minutes.” They’ve been making the album together. He shows me pages of notes he’s made on his iPhone, overarching narratives for the project, samples of ideas for lyrics, details of the sonic, fragments to remind him what to push for when producing.

“The narrative is as much in the production as the lyrics,” he explains. “It starts with hell, low frequencies, heavy bass, distortion. As the album progresses, it strips away until there’s almost nothing: no bass, no drums, no vocals. The outro is other-worldly; I wanted it to feel comforting. I’ve been pouring my whole life into this project. All of my brain is in it. Look at my face: my laptop screen has burned a hole in my retinas.”

The history of British music is, in many ways, a history of the suburbs, places like Basildon, on the fringes of the big city. These are nonplaces and commuter towns that birth movements that begin on the margins and slowly, improbably, overtake the centre. Suburbs generate boredom, and boredom sharpens the imagination. From the edges, you dream the centre into something larger, stranger, more dangerous and more alive.

Fakemink is a kind of suburban construction. His work belongs to a lineage of stubborn, residual creativity that refuses eradication – isolation rewired through the bedroom and the laptop into a private network connecting outward to the world. In this he is part of a lineage that includes The Rolling Stones, Sex Pistols, The Jam, Ian Dury and the Blockheads, Roxy Music, The The, Dean Blunt, Burial, The KLF and David Bowie. In his Basildon roots, he shares a particular connection with Depeche Mode, who were founded there in 1980. What links these disparate artists is their transformation of the boring reality of everyday existence – plus a feeling that there’s something more to life than this – into music and mythology. Excitement, escape, growing up, fucking up, freaking out, being sad, getting girls, getting a cool haircut, having no future, The Modern World. This is the samsara of youth culture: every generation remaking the same myths, rediscovering and reinventing the same fundamental rebellious, defining experiences for themselves.

My mum and her family, after a circuitous route around the world that began somewhere in eastern Poland in the Second World War, ended up moving to just outside of Basildon in the mid ’60s. In 1980, her younger brother, at the time a skinhead covered in piercings who only listened to reggae music, stumbled into a youth centre and witnessed one of the first gigs by Depeche Mode. He saw, for the first time in his life, a synthesizer. The next day, everyone he knew had copied Dave Gahan’s haircut.

When I was 14, the first Strokes album came out. Everyone I knew came into school the next week wearing Converse. I was 17 when the first single by the Klaxons came out. Everyone I knew suddenly started wanting to go to raves and began wearing neon.

Every subculture since the first subculture follows a similar logic. A new voice might appear that resonates in the present moment to the present generation. That resonance contains a new way of looking at the immediate past, one that the present generation just missed out on being old enough to experience first-hand. It finds something from it to carry forward but also much to jettison. It decides what is important from the past, and that forms a new way of understanding the present and the future. The exact form – the fashion, the sounds, the personality – changes every generation.

Fakemink’s own contribution to this cycle is the creation of a world that both draws heavily on, and completely warps, the mid-to-late ’00s, a time when he was still a child: an image of Dash Snow, a Givenchy T-shirt with red stars around the neck, a sliver of a memory the size of a reposted Tumblr jpeg of Kate Moss, Alexander McQueen, Tom Ford. In his music you can hear it in diamante-encrusted Kanye-isms, Burial-esque melancholy, shimmering guitars alongside the conspicuous consumption of American rap, the violent urban operatics of drill music and grime’s juxtaposition of realism and bravado. All this is ported through the transformational prism of the suburban imagination.

He learned to produce through listening, and he soon began rapping over the beats he was making. “When I started, it was so derivative,” he recalls now. “I was, like, 14, rapping in an American accent about dropping packs, guns, drugs – nothing that was happening in my life. I was trying to make stuff that reminded me of music that I would listen to in the car with my dad. My dad was really big on music, and we would drive to my grandparents’ house in Ilford all the time listening to Lil Wayne, Kanye, Eminem. He played a lot of jungle, drum ’n’ bass, reggae at home too. I think that’s all there in the music I make.”

Fakemink was 15 when the pandemic started. It’s easy to read something of the creative teenager’s forced retreat to the bedroom – and in that space, a reimagining of the world, its culture, music, visual iconography – into “Fakemink.”

“The day lockdown started I shaved a mohawk into my hair.” He shows me a picture of it on his phone, before scrolling through a few other variations his hair has taken over the years, of badly done home dye jobs, or being cut into various lengths. His hair is becoming famous. It’s a short crop on the top and flowing at the back, otherwise known as a “skullet.” Today he’s keeping it neater than it has been in the past.

“If I’m being honest, the haircut inspiration came from a picture of Yung Lean,” he says, of the Swedish rapper whom he recently got to meet in person. “I bumped into him in LA, and told him my room number at the Chateau Marmont, and one night I was woken up with him knocking on my door. I was having a rough time. Seeing him was great.”

He made his first album, ‘London’s Saviour’, in three days. He wrote, produced and recorded it all on his laptop in his childhood bedroom. “I had a small fanbase then, and when I dropped it, it didn’t really grow at first. I remember thinking, ‘This is a great project, what’s going on?’ Not to suck my own dick, but now I realise it was so ahead of its time. That album took, like, two years to be understood by everyone. Now I see people calling it one of the best cloud rap or UK rap albums of all time, and I made it in three days.”

Through 2024, Fakemink released about a song a week. Sometimes three. He would release them straight to his SoundCloud account, or Spotify. His is an internet-native scene, built on online communities rather than through the traditional music industry. His hype surged on the more traditional channels in the spring of 2025. He earned recognition from some of culture’s biggest names. He hangs out with Frank Ocean in Japan, Drake brings him out on stage, Timothée Chalamet is spotted at his gigs. ‘LV Sandals’, his collaboration with fellow UK rappers EsDeeKid and Rico Ace has become one of the defining cultural artefacts of late 2025–early 2026.

Part of Mink’s hype lies outside his music. He is, from certain angles, mainly lore, mainly mythology. He came of age during a time where every digital etching made remains forever, waiting to be rediscovered; an online archaeological record of often bizarre and cryptic material that only contributes to his mystery. You can still find a channel on YouTube that he ran with friends as a 13-year-old, filled with silly skits and teenage absurdism. On an Instagram Live in 2023, before he’d blown up, and with just eleven people watching, a pigeon landed on Fakemink’s head. He is sitting indoors. You can hear it first, cooing off screen, before fluttering and settling on his black hoodie. There is no explanation. Unphased, he simply says, “Get off my head, bro.” In another Instagram Live he was hit by a car while walking down the street. Recently he recorded an interaction with a neighbour berating him for playing his music too loud.

He is still coming of age publicly, halfway between internet fame and real-life stardom. At times that mythology forms faster than fixed identity or reality. Every musical choice and small detail of his life is poured over obsessively by fans on Reddit or X. “It’s a game. You play it or you don’t,” he says. “It’s not real, but I can use it to my advantage.” He’s built a world around himself. It is, I think, a construction, but it’s a useful and protective one. It’s both a natural outgrowth of Mink’s communicative and captivating nature and indicative of the relationship between a musician and their fanbase in 2026, with its cast of simultaneously intense, supportive, vindictive, parasocial and often anonymous online voices.

While it’s hard to separate the reality of Vincenzo Camille with the creation of Fakemink, I’m not sure it’s that interesting or necessary to try. Mythology is an integral part of the project. It should be enjoyed and embraced.

We finish our lunch and wander around the leisure park, past Pizza Hut, Nando’s, bowling alleys and cinemas, all clouded in the elegiac grey afternoon. We play ‘Mario Kart’ in the arcade. Mink plays as Wario. He is conscious of a couple watching him after we finish playing. “Cherish the times when you’re a nobody,” he says, laughing, as the couple walk past us twice, looking at him. “You’ll really only appreciate that once it’s too late.”

In the arcade he shows me a video he’s working on for the first track for ‘Terrified’. It features his frequent collaborator, Victoria Davidoff, running around an empty Chateau Marmont. A laser beam trained on her head, lights flickering in a cavernous ballroom. Then he plays me a song he’s working on with Playboi Carti, and which is so unreleased and secret that I think I’m not allowed to even describe it. “When I was making ‘London’s Saviour’, I had a German shepherd puppy named Jasmine,” he says, unprompted. “She had so much energy. I’d take her out for six hours a day while my dad was in hospital. We’d walk at night, in the park near my house, I’d kick a deflated football around for her while writing notes on my phone, listening to the music I was making.”

He’s just announced a spate of huge shows coming up later this year, his biggest yet. Coachella, Rolling Loud. He says he’s excited. He’s on the verge of stardom. He’s going to walk home he says, it’s only ten minutes from here.