80 Tracks in a Year, on a Label He Owns: fakemink from Ilford.

Most of the artists we cover are trying to work out how to own their masters. fakemink started that way and never stopped, which is why he is worth writing about even now that Drake has brought him out on stage.

He releases through EtnaVeraVela, which is his own label.

Where he’s from

Ilford, East London. Born January 2005, of Indian Punjabi and Algerian descent, and still based in London.

The origin story is one laptop. He told Dazed:

“I got a laptop for my birthday [from my dad] and I found a copy of FruityLoops 11 on the hard drive that I ended up using for years.”

His father was a drum and bass DJ, and played hip-hop classics on car journeys. That is the whole equipment list and the whole musical education, and it is worth holding next to the amount of gear most artists believe they need before starting.

He made music under the name 9090gate before becoming fakemink in late 2023.

What he sounds like

Cloud rap and UK underground rap, with heavy pitch-shifting, vocal manipulation and tempo changes inside tracks. Pitchfork described his breakthrough single as “bloghouse meets cloud rap”, which is a useful pair of reference points if you were around for either.

He has been filed under the jerk microgenre and distances himself from it.

The production instinct to listen for is the pitch-shifting. It is not a garnish on his records, it is the structural device, and it is the thing an artist who taught himself in FL Studio from the age of ten would arrive at.

The bit that matters if you make music

Volume, and what it does.

Dazed reports he uploaded 80 tracks to Spotify in 2024 alone. He describes his early years like this:

“I was just doing it as a hobby, I never thought it was something to ‘win’ at.”

And on his debut mixtape:

“I made London’s Saviour in three days, but no one seems to believe that.”

Set that against the advice most artists are given, which is to release rarely and polish endlessly. fakemink did the exact opposite and it worked, and it is worth being honest about why. Eighty releases in a year is a hundred experiments in public, and most of them do not need to land. It is a strategy that suits an artist who produces everything himself and pays nobody per track. It would ruin an artist paying £150 a time for mixing.

The rise

London’s Saviour, his debut mixtape, arrived in December 2023. “Easter Pink” broke through in 2025. In July 2025, Drake brought him out as a surprise guest at Wireless Festival, and the attention followed.

Then two releases in four months: The Boy Who Cried Terrified, an EP, on 29 January 2026, and the album Terrified on 22 May 2026.

Through all of it, his own label.

What the label actually means

EtnaVeraVela is easy to skim past. It should not be.

An artist at his level of attention is the exact profile a label signs, and the offer tends to arrive at the moment an artist has the most bargaining power and the least perspective. Releasing an album through your own company after a Drake cosign is a decision, not an accident, and it means he still owns the recordings that the last two years of attention were spent building.

There is a version of independence that means nobody has offered yet. This is the other one.

Whether it lasts is a fair question and not one we can answer. Artists sign later all the time, sometimes for good reasons. But the catalogue built in the meantime stays his, and that is the part that compounds.

Where to start

“Easter Pink”, because it is the one that opened the door and it shows the pitch-shifting clearly.

Then Terrified for the fully-formed version, and London’s Saviour if you want to hear what three days sounds like.