A sailor leaves his old life in Vanisher, Horizon Scraper. Quadeca gives that departure an album and a film, making the visual sequence part of how the story unfolds. Ben Lasky has expanded the project well beyond a set of songs about wanting to get away.
Released in 2025, Vanisher follows I Didn’t Mean to Haunt You and Scrapyard. Those records had already moved him beyond the rap performances that built his first audience. The new voyage gives music and visuals a shared narrative, though having a destination for the character does not settle how successfully each song gets him there.
Kieran Press-Reynolds’ Pitchfork review admired the scale while objecting to passages he found overwrought. That is a specific reservation about the songwriting, not a reason to dismiss the film or the project’s scope. It identifies the question a concept this elaborate has to face: whether the individual songs make the extended journey worthwhile.
The production is Lasky’s own, as it was on I Didn’t Mean to Haunt You, whose contributors included Danny Brown, Thor Harris and the Sunday Service Choir. His career has become a set of increasingly involved constructions, with the visual world now demanding as much attention as the audio.
Lasky commits to the sailor’s departure across two forms, so the film is part of the proposition rather than an optional explanation added later. Press-Reynolds’ reservations leave the central tension usefully unresolved. The construction is substantial; the songs still have to hold attention inside it. A large concept gives an artist more to accomplish, not an exemption from that test.