Truly new music has a way of unsettling the elders. Whether it’s early digital ragga confounding roots purists, jungle’s chopped breakbeats frustrating traditional musicians, or grime and drill’s youthful aggression unnerving middle-class parents, the shock of new sounds and approaches is as thrilling for the generation that creates them as it is bewildering for those left behind.

On the surface, that’s the tension playing out throughout the rise of ‘UK underground rap’: kids pissing off the previous generation with music they never saw coming, making up their own rules as they go along. “Oh, grime, drill and road rap value authenticity, sharp production and local influences? Fine. We’ll make ours ironic, lo-fi and extremely online.” Yet look behind the hype and listen with an open mind and anyone can find plenty to admire in how today’s artists mix and match influences, experiment and depict their lives and experiences. Unfortunately, you’ll find little of that daring originality in Fakemink’s Terrified, a dud of an album confirming the sceptics’ beliefs that—at its worst—UK underground rap is compromised music by and for thin-skinned neeks, and that it can’t stand up to scrutiny outside the context of a 30-second reel.

Algorithmically nominated as scene flagbearer thanks to the success of viral hits like “Truffle” and “Easter Pink”, on paper, Fakemink has a lot going for him—from Drake, Frank Ocean and Gucci co-signs to a genuine talent for production that’s allowed him to tailor his sound to emerging trends. Combine that with a canny ear for the type of sticky melodies fuelling TikTok and a manicured aesthetic that screams “I’m trying very hard to look effortless” and you can see why industry heads would react to his ascent with £ signs in their eyes. But across Terrified’s extended run time, all of that talent and momentum can’t paper over Mink’s fundamental flaws, namely a complete lack of depth, a predictable aesthetic, lyrics so inane A.I. could never, and an arrogance completely incommensurate with his abilities. Essentially, the hooks and beats can’t make up for him coming across like a privileged, pretentious neek.

But let’s be charitable for a moment because Terrified does offer some musical, if not lyrical, thrills. Like his scene peers, Mink’s music is built on a sturdy foundation of high-visibility melodic rap, from the superstar rage of Playboi Carti to the off-kilter post-trap of Lil Uzi Vert, bitcrushed and jumbled with niche micro-strains like jerk, plugg and cloud-rap and a heavy dose of arch-hyperpop. Crucially, that mostly American foundation is cross-pollinated with the UK’s longstanding love affair with bass weight and Mink’s homegrown, Essexian sensibility. It’s easy to imagine your average fan doomscrolling through endless Nettspend clones, only to perk up when encountering a variant that actually sounds like them. If you’re onboard with that concept but feel no need to support American nepo babies, tracks like “Tell Me What You’re Missing” provides all the maximalist, chronically online earworms you need, with the added bonus of a squarewave bassline straight out the Wiley playbook.

The problem is that this sounds great on a reel and offers a jolt of excitement mid-playlist, only to become exhaustingly one note across an entire album. Mink’s Achilles heel is that he simply has nothing worth rhyming about, so he defaults to perfunctory bars about money, girls and cars. The issue here isn’t moral: plenty of great artists, past and present, use those topics as springboards to explore their lives, upbringings, psyche, dreams, losses, victories and beyond. Finding depth, meaning and insight across themes others would dismiss out of hand is part of what’s made the past 50 years of Black music so great, but to pull it off, you need to have lived that life. That simply isn’t the case here, with practically every bar sounding like a rap ad-lib written after speedrunning a half-dozen Xaviersobased reels.

The result is an unbridgeable disconnect between the image Mink projects and what the music actually sounds like. Anyone can repeat, “You ain’t ever see this much money in your life, you wish,” but unless you give the listener a reason to identify with you, you’ll just come off as a bit of a prick. Perhaps to make up for this, Terrified buries the bars in the mix, slathering the vocals in gobs of effects, from chipmunk pitch-shifting to cavernous reverb. Fair play: that makes for a decent background listening experience, but that also turns Terrified into an album that sounds worse the more you pay attention.

Yet somehow Fakemink’s vocals aren’t even the worst part of the project—that dubious honour goes to the abysmal poetry interludes, the longest of which stretches out for an excruciating 7+ minutes. The musical equivalent of getting cornered in the pub by a coked-out student failing English lit, “Fire & Ice” is what happens when a 2D caricature tries to project depth: hilarious when it should be sombre and plodding when it should be light. The best thing I can say about it, is that it might provide all involved with some much-needed street cred: Mink might not have sold a drug in his life, but letting that girl prattle on for so long is definitely against the Geneva convention.

These weaknesses will be forgiven and handwaved away by Fakemink’s growing fanbase. After all, he’s their guy and we’ve already established that new music should confound old heads. But who exactly is doing the handwaving? Certainly not the audience that have propelled genres like Afrobeats or drill over the past decade—not when the Gen Z Essex man is proclaiming himself as their suburban saviour while also crashing out on festival stages worldwide. The truth of the matter is that it’s far easier to ignore UK underground rap’s middle-class influences when they’re being wielded by acts like Jim Legxcy or Lancey Foux, artists making good faith efforts to push the boundaries of Black British music. In Fakemink’s hands, however, the same impulses not only feel inauthentic, they feel contrived: a cheap way to rope in a mass audience while circumventing listeners that know the score. The smart play here would be to address the skill issue. Instead, we get pissy Instagram rants and more self-serving proclamations of Mink’s visionary genius.

Like it or not, Fakemink is on a timer, as he’ll only be able to coast on youth and image for so long until the algo replaces him for the next hot thing. Already, the most exciting variants of UK underground rap are combining the genre’s beats, flows and aesthetics to the wordiness and self-reflection of the old underground, both through the U.S. via acts on MIKE’s 10K label and in the UK, where names like Jadasea are mixing things up with jazz. That’s not to say there won’t always be an audience for Mink’s dopamine maximalism, but he’ll have to develop beyond a tariff-free Yeat or Nettspend to keep their attention. If not, he will likely join a long line of teenage rap provocateurs who push the zeitgeist forward only to run out of steam halfway through their 20s, only to watch as his innovations get chewed up by the next batch of kids with ambition.