Benjamin Lasky’s musical journey is an odyssey in and of itself. Nearly seven years ago, his impressions of other rappers in his “Styles of Rap” series and his diss track towards KSI—all released under the name Quadeca—made him a staple of the “Fast = Good” YouTube rap scene, which emerged in response to the auto-tuned crooning of late 2010s SoundCloud rap. But by the release of his third studio album, i didn’t mean to haunt you, Quadeca had become a darling for the chronically online music fans who frequent aggregate sites like RYM and AOTY or take Anthony Fantano’s word as gospel. His sound had transitioned from standard pop rap to ethereal folktronica, and densely layered dramatic production had become his defining quality. haunt you was immersive on its own, but Lasky’s decision to turn the album into an hour-long, cinematic journey about a ghost exploring the depths of the afterlife elevated the experience even further.
Quadeca has kept himself busy since that 2022 release. He dropped a series of EPs in late 2023 that were compiled into the Scrapyard mixtape a year later, produced and featured on the Kevin Abstract project Blush, and even started his own record label, X8 Music, on which he released his long-awaited fourth studio album:Vanisher, Horizon Scraper.
Naturally, the scale of Vanisher feels like a return to form, especially in comparison to his 2024 mixtape. Because Scrapyard was a collection of outtakes, it didn’t have an underlying concept or theme, but Vanisher sells listeners a reflective tale of a man sailing the seas after the apocalypse. Quadeca accompanied the album with a movie once again, this one depicting the sailor’s voyage and death with Lasky himself in the lead role. It’s an hour of Quadeca wordlessly sailing, wading through marshes, and drowning, all set to the entirety of Vanisher’s music.
While the production of Vanisher, Horizon Scraper is impressive, its story feels underbaked compared to Quadeca’s previous ventures into conceptual territories, lacking much of the raw emotion that made his earlier work so compelling. haunt you’s combination of warbly, depressing vocals and unsettling ambient production create a perfect atmosphere for the requiem of a ghost. In comparison, the vocals on Vanisher take a backseat to the elaborate, reverb-laden instrumentation, which does most of the heavy lifting—but it gradually buckles underneath the weight of its own concept. The ghost-in-purgatory setup for haunt you is a tough act to follow, and the story of the sailor never feels as intimate due to the decadent production drowning out the entire narrative.
The album opens with “NO QUESTIONS ASKED,” which features a Chico Buarque sample, delicate vocals from Lasky, and melodic piano and flute. It’s a beautiful, dramatic call-to-adventure, and a demonstration of Quadeca’s production chops. Unfortunately, most of these production tricks become less appealing as the album drags on. There are tone shifts and beat switches aplenty, but they occur so frequently and in such similar ways that the individual songs begin to blend together.
“WAGING WAR” is another dense mix of flute, string and piano instrumentation that slightly overpowers Quadeca’s flow, but it has a beat switch halfway through that immediately grabs your attention on a first listen. Then, that same trick is used again on “RUIN MY LIFE,” which is all soft strings and quiet, warbly vocals until suddenly it isn’t, the song exploding into a riotous bridge led by Maruja’s Harry Wilkinson as the strings get more frantic. By the time you get to the 7-minute “FORGONE” and its three different sections, the orchestral production and mid-song shifts have grown stale. Where i didn’t mean to haunt you felt desolate and fragile, Vanisher, Horizon Scraper flirts with maximalism more head-on. But when everything is so grandiose—so epic—it begins to feel a little like nothing is.
At times, the vocals are swallowed out by distortion, suffocated by the sheer volume of instrumentation. The album would’ve benefitted from giving some of these tracks room to breathe, to feel like songs with individual melodies and purposes rather than bit parts in a larger movie. The instrumental interlude “I DREAM ABOUT SINKING” drags at four minutes long, and the funness of “DANCING WITHOUT MOVING” is too quiet underneath the track’s all-consuming production.
It would have been nice to hear more Quadeca vocals on this album. The production is brilliant when mixed properly, but there are very few catchy hooks or standout singing performances that aren’t features. The lead single “GODSTAINED” sounds like a glimpse into a universe where Frank Ocean had a solo song on Tyler, The Creator’s Call Me If You Get Lost, and it is easily the most replayable song on the album. Quadeca shows off how much his singing and his verses have improved here, and none of it gets overwhelmed by the rest of the song’s mix. Unfortunately, moments like this are few and far between. “AT A TIME LIKE THIS” immediately follows and serves up a version of Quadeca fighting to be heard over the flute and horn instrumentation.
Vanisher, Horizon Scraper feels like a bit of a sidegrade from Scrapyard. It’s still depressing, existential, and insecure as always, but the sadness on Vanisher feels distinctly less personal due to being wrapped up in the nautical opus. Compared to songs like “PRETTY PRIVILEGE,” where Quadeca reckons with his inability to take positive compliments, Vanisher’s hard-hitting lyrics are often washed away by the album’s desire to tell a complete story, and that’s assuming you can even hear the story above the production. The sailor talking to a personification of depression on “WAGING WAR” is certainly unique, but somehow it still feels less confessional than professional. i didn’t mean to haunt you was able to balance emotional moments with a high-order concept well, so it’s disappointing that Vanisher feels like it’s pulling its punches.
This isn’t necessarily true for the songs on the back half. “THUNDRRR” at the very least is much more alive than the rest of the material, and it sees Quadeca turning the energy up to an 11, trading the lush strings for a bass-heavy drum beat that fulfills a similar hype niche that “knots” did on i didn’t mean to haunt you. It’s a nice change of pace with some fun flows and adlibs from Quadeca, but mostly it just makes you just wish the first pulse of life in this album wasn’t so late into the sailor’s quest. “THE GREAT BAKUNAWA” continues the energy with an absolutely killer Danny Brown verse, performed from the perspective of a moon-eating sea serpent, but comes to a grinding halt as Lasky meanders for four minutes trying to recapture his peer’s hype. The blaring saxophones of “CASPER” close out the album, and the dark reprise of Quadeca’s vocals from “NO QUESTIONS ASKED” is a great full-circle moment. However, having what’s essentially a Maruja solo track (complete with two Wilkinson verses) as the finale feels like the culmination of Quadeca being a side character on his own album.
More often than not, the visuals blend together into an indistinct collage of aquatic slice-of-life shots that don’t end up making Vanisher, Horizon Scraper drag any less. It’s cool that Quadeca actually learned how to sail for the movie, but there’s really not much to go on here. The sailor sets sail, sails, and then dies. There’s a sea serpent and an apocalypse, but we don’t see those things in the movie anyway. It’s supposed to be tragic, but the entire thing just ends up feeling like an underwhelming pastiche of Moby Dick and Into the Wild that fails to capture what made either text so great. Vanisher wants to be an epic tragedy of a solitary sailor, but the story is often drowned out by crashing waves of reverb and overwhelming compositions. It’s a grandiose celebration of Quadeca’s production talent, but much of the album feels—not unlike its central sailor—like it’s drifting in circles seeking a horizon that always remains out of reach.
