Quadeca
I Didn't Mean to Haunt You

In recent years, there has been a remarkable increase in the popularity of content creators. YouTube has quickly become the preferred medium for building a career from scratch, by being oneself and generating relatability starting from the pure fact of being young. Naturally, the entertainment offered on the platform has come to touch the most disparate fields. Music used as parody is an all-too-easy target of this content expansion. Often, however, those who end up creating actual songs with a comedic intent twist melodic and rhythmic elements to their humorous script, diverting the audience’s attention from the music to the lyrics. In cases where this modus operandi is not the result of a savvy analysis of communication means but merely incompetence in the musical realm, the content creator will remain in a larval state as a well-rounded artist. Otherwise, the transition will still present quite a few challenges.

Benjamin Lasky, known as Quadeca, was born in 2000 and has practically lived on the Internet ever since. YouTube was for years his preferred means for sharing his passions. He started, like many others, with FIFA gameplay videos, gradually transitioning towards more music-oriented content, becoming a true rapper. Despite the clownish attitude, he was always aware of the long road ahead to becoming a complete artist (as evidenced by the strongly self-aware title of his debut mixtape dated 2015, "Work in Progress").

The chrysalis referred to earlier has only become a butterfly in recent years, as Lasky has increasingly distanced himself from YouTube to give voice to his artistic ambition. The first evident step in this direction was taken with the album "From Me to You" from last year, and in particular with the single "Sisyphus". Quadeca thus gained credibility as an artist (even then proudly noting with good reasons that he produced nearly the entire record himself) and learned from his mistakes, foremost among them the excessive gap between the release of the first singles and the completed LP.

"I Didn't Mean to Haunt You" was undoubtedly the year's most anticipated album among those that magazines predictably overlook. Listening to it confirms Quadeca's evolution, now a full-time musician. The twenty-two-year-old from Los Angeles has managed to carve out a comfortable niche to experiment with textures without giving up catchy hooks with clear emo-rap influences, a genre that naturally flirts with pop.

From a textual point of view, "I Didn't Mean to Haunt You" is a concept album about the protagonist's suicide and his transformation into a ghost until accepting his condition. A storyline that risked falling into pathos, but Lasky manages to keep a firm grip for most of the product.

Musically, the influences are varied. Quadeca is keen to break free from the derogatory label of "YouTube rapper" and moves his productions into the realm of a personal hybrid of folk-pop and electronic.

The album manages to be both fairytale-like and spectral. The two souls are beautifully encapsulated in the opening "sorry4dying", a cathartic mini-suite that introduces us to the continuous dialogue of the ghost with itself and with its family, wanting to make its presence felt without haunting them.

The guests certainly leave their mark. The standout name among the featuring is Danny Brown, one of the most unique voices in alternative hip-hop, able to master any genre thanks to his delirious clownish timbre. Here he appears in one of the most intense episodes, "house settling", where the desperate protagonist resorts to a gas leak to make his presence known to the living, and delivers his lines from the perspective of carbon monoxide ("Can’t touch or feel me, but when you’re near me fill up your chest and your eyes get teary. Say your peace, say no more grief. It’s over now, your soul will sleep"). "He was the only person who could do it," Quadeca said in a recent interview with critic Anthony Fantano.

The host's voice isn’t the most powerful available (thus relying on the Sunday Service Choir in the celestial "fractions of infinity"), but that doesn’t stop him from including tracks like "knots", an erratic piece of industrial origin, where the patterns meet at a crossroads between Nine Inch Nails, Death Grips, and Injury Reserve’s "By the Time I Get to Phoenix". The protagonist's final ascension is foreshadowed by the refrain "I don’t fade to black, I cut to static", where the TV interference is intended by the author as the eternal light of the afterlife as opposed to the void traditionally imagined by eschatology. Three minutes of interference and various noises close the album, forming the second half of the final "cassini’s division" (featuring Thor Harris, drummer of Swans).

Naturally, the inexperience of being twenty-two emerges at a couple of points in the tracklist. The aforementioned "cassini’s division" is a monologue that’s at least inessential if reached after fifty minutes of music. Not always is the emotional climax of the numerous ballads masterfully handled: "fantasyworld" prolongs its ambient coda, and "picking up hands" is the weakest among tracks with prominent guitar elements. However, the multicolored facets of "born yesterday", sonically close to recent releases by Jane Remover, manage to render these as venial sins, solvable with greater concision.

The uniqueness of production is undoubtedly the highlight of an album that showcases songwriting still in its embryonic phase: sophisticated arrangements and voices distorted and imbued with grain are the hallmark of this album.

As we await to see Quadeca's next moves, we can say with certainty that "I Didn't Mean to Haunt You" is a bright star in the firmament of modern avant-pop: not for everyone, not immediately assimilable or classifiable, but deserving of the significant exposure it is receiving online.