Fakemink Is The Chosen Kid

December 4, 2025. More than five months before Terrified drops, Fakemink sends me beats and unfinished songs. 

He tells me nobody has heard them, just him and Roshina. 

He tells me the project will be progressive, that it is not a mixtape or a compilation, that the songs will have one specific order. 

He tells me he cried tears of joy knowing how much he is going to "shit on everybody." 

He tells me he is only showing me because he thinks I actually care, and that he does not plan to show his team until he has to submit it.

He says the whole journey is just a cycle. “The chosen kid will then become me and inspire another kid.”

We FaceTime for ten minutes.

Terrified is nineteen tracks long and self-produced, opening with church organs and a girl screaming the title of the record into nothing. It closes with the same voice describing a morning after the world did not end. Between these, Fakemink builds one of the strangest, most ambitious, and most cohesive things anyone in this scene has ever put out. He has made an album about what it costs to be the chosen one.

The opening track sets the tone for the songs to follow. The rapid, scary sound of intensifying church organs lands like a film score, perfectly encapsulating what will come to be a cinematic experience. The listener already knows the stakes are biblical and that Fakemink, the protagonist, is Terrified.

The closing track does the inverse. The same voice returns. The beat is calmer. She describes the morning after a night when everyone was certain the world was ending, and the track produces one of the most visceral reactions I have had to music in quite a while.

(The voice on these, and all the interlude tracks, belongs to Victoria Davidoff, the girl also featured on the Terrified cover.)

Those two interludes do something interesting. They tell the listener that everything in between, the full Terrified album, is a trial. The opening puts him inside of it. The closing illustrates his survival. Everything else is what it took to survive.

This is an album about spiritual ordeals. The chosen kid gets chosen, and then enters the trial. What remains is the question of what exactly he is being put through. Is it the trial of fame? Of money? Of drugs? Of love? Or of finding peace while combatting all of the above?

The religious allusions are the life source of the album, and Fakemink uses these as a way to illustrate his own life.

The clearest example is in Playlist. After a verse about exhaustion, infidelity, and overspending, he raps that he knows seven seals are waiting. Then he repeats the phrase. Seven seals. Seven seals. Seven seals.

The reference is to the Book of Revelation. The Seven Seals are what hold the scroll of the apocalypse closed, and the breaking of each one releases a different horseman, a different judgment, a different end of the world. Fakemink approaches it in a braggadocious manner. He is not afraid of the seals, he is the one they are waiting for.

That one line encompasses the album's entire theology. The trial is real and biblical in scale, and Fakemink is the protagonist being tested.

This same theology continues to surface across the record. In Night Blooming Jasmine he raps "They tryna cut my hair, I'm Samson." Samson is the Old Testament strongman whose power came from his uncut hair and who was undone by the woman he loved. The reference is a confession that the people closest to him are the ones trying to undo him.

Smaller references run through the rest of the tracklist. Victoria talks about transfiguration and mercy on Fire & Ice, the archangels of fame watch down on Fakemink in Essex Girls, he asks himself what Jesus would do in All Eyes on Me, and he prays repeatedly, in Creep. These smaller references are not too important on their own, but come together perfectly to create the world which Fakemink is trying to immerse us in, something he is so talented at doing. 

This is what makes Terrified different from the other albums within this scene. The vocabulary is cohesive, conceptual, and worldbuilding, and is indicative of who Fakemink is.

There is a man named Enzo who made this album, but there is also a character named Fakemink who appears on it. These are not the same person.

This is true of most musicians, with their constructed self being at some level of distance from the person who wakes up in the morning. What is unusual about Terrified is that the album seems to know this.

Creep is the song that makes the case. It’s about isolation. He raps that he had to be alone before he turns into an animal, that he had to leave home, and that he doesn't know where he would be if he hadn't left. The whole song is built around a person, Enzo, who has retreated from his former reality, in order to become what he is becoming, Fakemink. 

The references to 9090gate, his former name, made this very clear to me. He uses the name twice on the album, once in Like a Virgin and once in Kiss of Death. Both times the references are to past money and past work. The implication is that 9090gate is what came before Fakemink and that the personas have their own history.

If the trial of Terrified is fame, then the persona is the body the trial happens in. The chosen kid had to don a character in order to go through this trial and Enzo wrote the songs about Fakemink’s trial. This is the part of what makes the project compelling. He is so hyper-aware of what it cost to become Fakemink.

This album contains the first real Fakemink love song we've ever heard. But the love song is not separate from the trial and is instead part of it, where he loses the girl he loved.

Retard Angel is the emotional center of the record. Whatever is left of Enzo by the last track, speaks for the length of one song, in his most layered performance yet.

He says "I didn't fall for who you were, I fell for what you were in." A few lines earlier he said "I fell for the damage that needed a cure" and "we saw pain in each other, I think that's what pulled me in." He did not fall for the girl, he fell for the trouble she was in and the chance to fix it, which he also saw as a chance to be fixed by her.

Then there was "so pure beside you I could never feel clean," which must be read through the lens of the trial. He has spent the whole album becoming what he is becoming. The drugs, the money, the fame, the cycle. Enzo is so far immersed in his Fakemink character that her presence next to him reads as judgment. She does not need to judge him verbally. She is clean and he is not and this dichotomy is the verdict. That is yet another cost of the Fakemink trial.

The song closes on the line "I wonder where you'll fall. You know you'll be just fine." Again calling her an angel, as the title implies, but fully shutting the door on his past, and accepting he will never be fixed.

The title itself is part of the shutting. Calling someone a "retard angel" is what someone who cannot say "I loved her" without immediately undercutting the seriousness of those words would do. This undercutting is the defense, and perhaps the ego. It is what lets the tenderness exist on the page at all. He loved her enough to write the song but he did not love her enough to write it without protecting himself.

Back in December, XXXTentacion came up in conversation between me and Fakemink. I told him I’d noticed him being into X lately. He said yes, and that X was the goat.

X was twenty when he was killed in Deerfield Beach, Florida in June of 2018. Shot through the neck during a robbery outside a motorcycle dealership in Broward County. 

The reason X was on Fakemink's mind is the reason this album exists. He told me that "If it wasn't for that Akademiks call he did I would not be here." In January 2018, five months before he was killed, XXXTentacion spent three hours on Live with DJ Akademiks discussing frequencies, manifestation, astral projection, hidden knowledge, and the power music has over the human mind. It became his last filmed interview. Fakemink watched it as a kid in Essex and decided he could do this. The chosen kid was chosen because he watched another chosen kid on a livestream, five months before that kid was murdered.

I told him "And now you're to some kid out there what he was to you."

He replied: "It is a crazy feeling. But it is just a cycle. The Chosen Kid will then become me and inspire another kid."

He capitalized Chosen Kid, which signals to me that the concept already had a name in his head, months before the album was finished. The whole frame of Terrified is understood through this. The trial is real, the trial is of biblical proportions, and the trial will get handed down. Some kid in Essex or Florida or somewhere else is watching Fakemink the way Enzo watched X, and the next album is already planting its seed in that kid's head, whether the kid knows it yet or not.

This is the cycle the album is about, and the album is full of references to Mink’s own youth. He raps that he made his first million at nineteen in Forget Me Knot. He raps that he was eighteen when he made it in Wrong Relief. He raps that he’s been getting money since 9090 in Like a Virgin, which means before he was Fakemink. 

Hard Candy contains the line "Saw me when I was 15, hear me now. Keep going, keep going, so my little bro proud." Read through the lens of the cycle, the little bro is also the version of Fakemink at fifteen who saw someone else doing this and decided he could do it too. The line addresses two audiences at once. The people watching him now, as well as the kid he was when he was watching someone else. 

But this lineage can be deadly. That is what the album knows when it talks about the trial. The trial is real, and it killed X. Some chosen kids do not become the figure who inspires the next chosen kid. They die in the middle of it and someone else has to carry forward what they started. That is what Fakemink is doing on this album. He is carrying on whatever spirit X instilled in him, and pushing it forward to the next kid.

The album closes on a track called Etna.

Etna is short for Etna Vera Vela, the world Fakemink has built around himself. He raps it earlier on the album, on Like a Virgin. "Etna Vera Vela bumper sticker on my fucking Beamer." This phrase is his signature, the thing he stamps on his work. The closer is named after it, which means the album ends by signing itself. The trial happens, and Fakemink signs his name to it and walks away.

Victoria speaks over a quiet beat. She describes the night before, when the protagonist and the people around him were certain the world was ending. Angels hopping from rooftop to rooftop. Everyone making promises they could never possibly keep. Then she describes the morning. "I step into the light. And I let the sun warm the places that were cold all night."

The trial is complete, and Fakemink survived it, against all odds. "The universe, it seems, has survived us."

That is what the trial ends in. Not victory, just the chance to wake up again. He is a little overdone. He is a little embarrassed about the theatrics of the night before. But he is alive. Which, all things considered, is not a bad outcome.

That is what survival is. Not the absence of the trial, but the morning after it.

A note from the writer.

My favorites are Wrong Relief and Retard Angel.

On Wrong Relief he said "I'm in LA missing London, money in abundance. Hollywood feeling like an open-air dungeon." I have never heard anyone describe LA that way even though so many people have tried to. The hook is so catchy and he deserves to flex on this one.

Retard Angel is the song where he writes an entire track about a single feeling, which is a hard thing to do. Most rappers cannot sit inside one emotion for three minutes without reaching for a change of subject. 

This is the first album analysis I have ever written and the journey was a bit emotional.

I am looking out my window right now, listening to Retard Angel, thankful to God for the sun that rose this morning and vanquished the darkness. 

“Weeping may last through the night, but joy comes with the morning.” Psalm 30:5