The enigmatic UK rapper/producer crafts a creepy strobe-lit California noir. “I’m in LA missing London, money in abundance/Hollywood feeling like an open-air dungeon,” the English rapper fakemink sings queasily on “Wrong Relief,” a track buried deep inside the beautiful nightmare of his second album Terrified . The enigmatic rapper/producer released his debut album in 2023, but broke through in 2025 with tracks like “Easter Pink” and “LV Sandals.” Suddenly the underground rapper was blowing up on TikTok, gracing magazine covers, and sharing festival stages with Drake and Playboi Carti. A brief North American tour in 2025 brought fakemink to Los Angeles, where he began conceptualizing Terrified .—a creepy California noir where models try to steal your soul and vampires drive Wraiths down Hollywood Boulevard. fakemink describes Terrified . as a crude caricature of LA, written after he’d returned home to London and could rebuild his experience from warped memory. What materialized were strobe-lit vignettes straight out of a Nicolas Winding Refn film—fallen angels in five-star hotels, tooth enamel rotting from neon vape juice—set to blown-out beats that sound like the Castlevania soundtrack turned inside out. The rapper winds his way through these doomed but glamorous scenes, wondering if the pleasure is worth the pain: “One man’s poison is another man’s feast,” he raps on the witch-housey “Essex Girls .” Here and there, a mysterious narrator (perhaps Tina Temps, the shadowy figure regularly listed on his composition credits) delivers strange and fantastical spoken-word poems: “Last night we were certain the world was collapsing/That we were tumbling through a terrible but glittery kaleidoscope/Angels hopping from rooftop to rooftop/Devils and ghosts curled inside hotel beehives/Sleeping in hot feverish honey/Everyone declaring eternal love/People making promises that they could never possibly keep/Not even until the morning/Eternal despair/And now look/Morning.”