Fakemink performs at the Gobi Tent during the 2026 Coachella Valley Music and Arts Festival at Empire Polo Club on April 10, 2026 in Indio, Calif.
Amy Sussman/Getty Images for Coachella
At first, things looked very, very bad for Fakemink. He was standing on a Coachella stage, rapping to one of his most popular tracks, surrounded by an eager crowd. And still, it was all wrong. His voice sounded thin, and his fans were not moving.
It was his first song, “Easter Pink.” The rapper sprinted onto the stage wearing glittery silver pants with a gray Burberry scarf tied around his waist. “Easter Pink” is one of his best and most popular tracks, a 90-second head rush of pumping bass, chopped-up vocal samples and rap verses pitched up to the cadence of a chipmunk. Any fan of Fakemink knows it. And this crowd was a friendly one, crammed with the rapper’s loyal Gen Z followers, many of whom rushed to the barriers as soon as the previous act, CMAT, left the stage.
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And still, the track fell flat. From the start, the rapper sounded out of breath. His choppy, unprocessed vocals clashed with his backing track. And the track’s beat, which sounds heavenly on car speakers, was muddied by its bass, which drowned out its intricacies.
His fans held up their phones to film, but their engagement stopped there. They knew the song, but they did not move their bodies.
It seemed to be a distinct possibility that the 21-year-old rapper would bomb his first Coachella performance, one of the biggest shows of his nascent career. But over the course of the rapper’s 40-minute set, he managed two feats: first, to smother the hype built up for his performance. And second, to reverse the first feat and resuscitate a dead crowd, which he had killed a few moments earlier. By the time Fakemink walked off stage, fans were chanting for an encore.
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Fakemink, or Vincenzo Camille, is a 21-year-old rapper and producer. He wears a strange mullet that’s buzzed in the front and shaved on the sides. He calls himself, “London’s Saviour,” which is also the name of his only album (even though he’s from Essex).
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Last year, Fakemink blew up at a dizzying pace. The closest comparison is probably Chappell Roan’s ascent to stardom in 2023. At the start of 2025, the rapper had 76,000 monthly listeners on Spotify; by January 2026, that number climbed to 8 million. It’s the sort of thing that leaves suspicious onlookers throwing around “industry plant” accusations, but the simpler explanation is that Fakemink is making the right music for his time. It was as if in the middle of the night, a software update had been uploaded into every hip hop fan’s brain, and suddenly, the rapper’s sound — a haze of skittering snares, “Skins” references, helium-pitched vocals and nostalgic stabs of piano — just clicked.
High schoolers, celebrities, music writers: Everyone exposed to Fakemink’s music seemed to find themselves sucked into his hype machine. Drake, a famed culture vulture, brought him onstage at last year’s Wireless Festival. He linked up with Frank Ocean, who posted pictures of the meet on Instagram, and Timothée Chalamet went to his show in London. Fakemink walked in Gucci’s fall 2026 show, alongside rappers Nettspend and EsDeekid.
But for the start of his Coachella set, it looked like Fakemink had run up against his limitations. The crowd was cold, and the rapper seemed to sense it. “Come on, it’s Friday night,” he said, addressing the audience, which would have sounded like a normal hype routine if there wasn’t a twinge of disappointment in his voice.
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“I’m tryna do this like how we do it in London,” he said at other points. He praised one side of the crowd’s energy, and complained that the other side was dead.
Fakemink may be a brilliant producer and a sharp lyricist, but he is not the most technically skilled rapper. This may be expected for a musician who hit his stride recording songs from his bedroom. He seems to struggle with breath control, as evidenced by his tendency to drop every other line in some verses, letting the pitched-up voice on his backing track carry the weight.
And then, through some alchemy, “London’s Saviour” turned it all around. It started when he played an unreleased song. “No one’s ever heard this one before,” he told fans. “It’s a new one.”
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Typically, this sort of move kills an already-dead crowd (who can sing along to something they don’t know?), but the track, which samples Cyndi Lauper’s “Time After Time,” sounded good on the first listen, without the muddy bass that hamstrung some of Fakemink’s other songs.
It was enough to get the momentum rolling for the rapper’s biggest hit, “LV Sandals,” which immediately opened a mosh pit. This reporter tried taking a video, but was knocked off balance by a young woman bouncing up and down rapping along to the song’s refrain: “Louis V Sandals / Crazy, hoes act scandalous.” (It sounds better than it reads.)
Fakemink performs at the Gobi Tent during the 2026 Coachella Valley Music and Arts Festival at Empire Polo Club on April 10, 2026 in Indio, Calif.
Amy Sussman/Getty Images for Coachella
From there on, the crowd was hot, and stayed hot for the rest of the night. Mink rolled into two other hits, the banger “Fidelio” and the angelic “Makka.” During “Makka,” the rapper paused the track and ordered his fans to squat down, then jump up in the air at the drop.
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It became clear at this point that if Fakemink was not the strongest live rapper, then he was at least a strong performer, more than capable of delivering passion, and making his fans feel it. As he grew more confident, he leaned in harder. The cracks in his voice on “Music and Me,” his best song, read as an excess of energy, not a lack of control.
“You talk about a feelin’, I feel it now,” he practically shouted, waving his hand side to side with the crowd. “Look back if I could, but I’m not allowed.”
After his last track, “Blow the Speaker,” the rapper jumped off the stage and shook hands with his fans at the barricade. Then, after a few, “I love you’s to his friends and the crowd, he was gone. But if the second half of his set was any indication, you’ll be seeing more of him soon.
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