I wanted to give this piece a snappy title that serves as the main thesis of my argument, but my thoughts on this album are too disjointed, too sporadic, to neatly box in a couple words. So, let the lack of a cute title serve as a warning that I don’t really have anything overarching to say; instead, just know that I have listened to this album a lot, thought about this album a lot, and I need to share these thoughts with others lest my head explode. Enjoy.
Quadeca is a rather elusive figure in the music space. I used to characterize him as the “YouTube rapper turned alternative cult classic” but I don’t think this is all that accurate anymore. Ben’s various interviews over the years make it clear that he was a songwriter from day one, taking lessons with his hippie piano teacher and writing his own ballads every week. Rapping on YouTube was simply the thing that got him traction on the internet, and it’s easy to stay in that box when it’s serving you well.
This is why Quadeca’s I Didn’t Mean to Haunt You came as such a shock to many. Before, those who saw him floating around the internet space pegged him as the corny “white guy internet rapper” type and let him simmer on the back burner. Haunt You , on the other hand, was a sharp departure from this: sure, there was some hip-hop influence, and the album proudly sported a Danny Brown feature, but it felt much more emo-folk singer-songwriter than Ben’s past projects . It felt vulnerable, emotional, dynamic, trance-like—haunting, dare I say. Haunt You gave listeners a real glimpse into Quadeca’s maximalist tendencies that further shaped his sound on future LPs. It’s beautiful and heartbreakingly sad and transformative, and I love it. I come back to it regularly, and it has served as the primary point of comparison for me when listening to Quadeca’s new album.
But this isn’t about Haunt You. It’s about something even more grand and mysterious in its conception, something with higher highs and lower lows. It’s a musical rollercoaster, and I am absolutely fascinated with it.
Vanisher, Horizon Scraper has been known to the public for over a year. It appeared in May 2024 as a teaser at the end of the YouTube release for Scrapyard ’s B-sides, featuring a rather infamous “coming soon” message. Since then, the rollout has been quite mysterious, with various snippets popping up on social media, a few singles nearly shock-dropped, and only a week’s notice before the actual album released.
When it finally dropped on that fateful Thursday night, I made an effort to lie down and soak the album up. I was prepared to be led through an intense emotional journey like Haunt You that chewed you up and spat you out, all while being beautiful in its soundscape and engaging in its songwriting. But on my first listen of Vanisher , I was left with a bit of an empty feeling. I seriously thought to myself: “Did I do something wrong? Was I in the right headspace for it?” And it seems like many others had this thought as well.
Let’s start with the good: I absolutely adored the singles on the album—or, at least, the songs that felt like singles. ‘MONDAY’ has been and will continue to be one of my favorite songs of all time. It’s just that beautiful. ‘GODSTAINED’ is an engaging, fun, serenading bossa nova-style track with some great rapping at the end. ‘DANCING WITHOUT MOVING’ felt like the ‘Way Too Many Friends’ of the album, an earwormy track with a great chorus and some impressive rapping. ‘THUNDRRR’ was an angst-filled trip of a song that carries the same rage as ‘Knots’ off Haunt You. These songs alone make the album absolutely worth a listen.
I’ve spent some time thinking about why these songs do so much more for me than the others, and my best guess is that they are much more deliberate and narrowed in scope: they don’t try to be more than they are. They’re pared back like a pop song to the point where the vocals and songwriting can really shine. When a song leans on layering to sound full is when it stops being magical. This is why I think Scrapyard made such a splash that it did—all of those songs feel like the best singles on their hypothetical albums, like the mixtape is constantly putting its best foot forward.
The album undoubtedly shows glimpses of musical wonder, times when you are so swept up in emotion that everything else melts away: the repeated motif “I’ll be there when no one is” that bumps up in key on ‘NO QUESTIONS ASKED’. The syncopated ride bells in ‘RUIN MY LIFE’. The refrain “Call it, call it, call it what you want / But there’s karma in the current when it’s calm” on ‘AT A TIME LIKE THIS’. The out-of-tune bridge on ‘MONDAY’. The cut off adlib on ‘DANCING WITHOUT MOVING’. The breathy vocals on ‘THUNDRRR’. The drowning feeling at the end of ‘CASPER’. There are so many little moments in this album that absolutely blow my mind, and I guarantee that I will find more on each listen.
But these moments are fleeting, and in order to get to them, you have to listen to a few moments that don’t exactly hit the mark. It’s by no means a slog, don’t get me wrong—there are many other parts of this album I still like but don’t love enough to comment on. But it makes for an album that feels disjointed not in its subject but in its magic. It’s the reason I don’t listen to Sweet Trip’s velocity: design: comfort all the way through that often; while there is some absolute magic in moments like the shoegaze in ‘Fruitcake and Cookies’ and the chorus in ‘Pro: Lov: Ad,’ other parts drag on too long to make a full listen worth it.
While it’s not as intense of a feeling as V:D:C , I still get this discontinuity with Vanisher. I will happily sit through ‘NO QUESTIONS ASKED’, a song that some skip in their listens, but others like ‘I DREAM ABOUT SINKING’, ‘NATURAL CAUSES’, and—don’t kill me—‘THE GREAT BAKUNAWA’ I can definitely go without. ‘I DREAM ABOUT SINKING’, while ending in a brilliant crescendo, doesn’t do enough in the first three quarters to make the wait worth it. ‘NATURAL CAUSES’ tries to be vulnerable and haunting but ends up falling very flat. ‘THE GREAT BAKUNAWA’ sadly misses the mark in a way I will spend a paragraph trying to explain.
I know that ‘THE GREAT BAKUNAWA’ is near the top of many people’s song rankings, but to me it feels like the song was just the toast for Danny Brown’s jelly to lie on. And this is coming from someone who really loved Danny’s appearance on Haunt You —his character was incredibly creative, and he felt intertwined not only in the song, but in the story as a whole. He felt like a complement to the song, like he was the perfect piece to slot into the wider puzzle. In contrast, Danny’s appearance on Vanisher felt forced, like a square peg trying to fit into a round hole. Instead of being set up in the first half of the song, there’s a brief, lackluster chorus and he just hops on. The beat feels a bit tired, like the song was just being built for someone to rap on. All of these make a song that is flawed in its conception, and even though Danny and Quadeca’s verses were fun and well-executed, the song is okay at best.
I felt something similar with ‘CASPER’, the album’s closer. Another review summed it up well: it felt more like Maruja’s song than Quadeca’s song. And this by no means is a bad thing in the right circumstance, but a closer is really where the album’s architect should shine, so Maruja’s appearance at the very end makes it feel like he’s stealing the spotlight a bit. The song is definitely good, and its ending blew my mind on the first listen, but it doesn’t fit as a closer to Quadeca’s concept album.
I am definitely conflicted with this album. But this conflict doesn’t differentiate a bad album from a good album—instead, it differentiates a great album from a perfect one. I have listened to this album more in its first week than the first week of any other album, and I love it to bits. I’ll keep returning to it and I’ll keep running its singles until the day I die. But when I see others hailing this album as the pinnacle of music, one of the best of all time, I can’t help but sense a bit of naivete, like their excitement for a new Quadeca project is obscuring the album’s fundamental flaws. The production is beautiful on this album, and I think most listeners will agree with that, but production alone can’t carry an album to the top of the totem pole.
I have to admit that Haunt You didn’t leave me jaw-agape on the first listen—I had to let it marinate. And it may be the same case for Vanisher , where I have to love the songs for what they do right and let the imperfections fade into the background. But as it stands now, I don’t think Vanisher will be able to buff out the dents in its armor. I love this project, but I also think Quadeca can do better. I hope for a future where I can glaze a Quadeca project as much as I did with Haunt You , but for now, I’ll have to wait for that time to come.