Benjamin Lasky leapt into fame as the lowest of the low: A YouTube rapper. He built his name, Quadeca, with abrasive diss track hi-jinks and even more clickbaity imitations of famous MCs. But in the last half-decade, the Los Angeles musician has reinvented himself as an art-pop auteur, the kind of guy who travels to a small island in the Philippines to film a movie-length music video for his new and easily most ambitious album yet, Vanisher, Horizon Scraper.

Quadeca is obsessed with the open waters, its unconquerable hugeness. In the narrative of both the album and the movie, Quadeca plays a sailor leaving the comforts of his past life to embark on a quest for freedom and self-discovery—imagine Moby-Dick if Ahab were the last man on Earth and a 24-year-old with a neat puff of chin beard who’s beloved by Rate Your Music. Along the way, he finds a bottle, fights a beast, and finally drowns. It’s also a journey across the ocean of Quadeca’s mind, traversing his anxieties and existential fears: The way that being a perfectionist feels like a solo voyage into the dark, unsure if he’s benefiting anyone but himself; worries about AI “threatening the magic of the world” and ushering in the apocalypse. Vanisher bursts at the seams with metaphors, double-entendres, and a mille-feuille pastry’s worth of musical layers. It’s beautiful and overwrought, a stab at transcendence that works best as pure shivery sound rather than a story to dissect and decipher.

Quadeca departs from South America, looping the first three seconds of Brazilian artist Chico Buarque’s 1971 album Construção into the beat for “No Questions Asked.” “Waging War” melds flamenco dance-clops with Lex Luger snares, and “That’s Why” flips Alberto Baldan Bemo’s sumptuous “Samoa,” originally composed for an erotic film in the ’70s, into a canvas for existential wondering. His optimistic feelings collapse into dread as he realizes he’s gone too far to turn back. He faces off against the mythological serpent-dragon Bakunawa, played by Danny Brown, who threatens to eat the moon and can only be quelled by music. The ending teeters between terror and relief, as the sailor accepts his imminent death while seemingly grateful for the voyage. And that’s the story.

Along the way, Quadeca toys with baroque pop and bossa nova like a tweaked rap producer, finessing every chord loop and textural nano-layer until you can practically smell the salty coastline. His previous music was often experimental yet streamlined, constantly restless and mutating; he let the individual ideas sing without burying them in decorative textures. This album, by contrast, does everything, all the time. It’s closer to brakence’s neurotic intricacy, where songs contain rich stacks of instruments and verses unfold like a riddle without a solution.

While the results can be precious and overcooked, Vanisher mostly lives up to its titanic premise: an apocalyptic tale about a man chasing the horizon—and himself—channeled through what feels like a million sound-fragments. “Natural Causes” cuts between harrowing and heavenly, as Quadeca sings about trying to escape a psychic torment he can’t shake. He’s at his happiest on “Dancing Without Moving,” urging everyone to “get low with the setting sun” while the instruments tangle together like a terrarium of brightly colored plants.

Elsewhere, he sings from what seems to be the POV of a dirty bottle and the horizon itself; on the violent “Thundrrr,” he threatens to knock down trees in a delirious, gaspy warble. The serpent-fighting soundtrack for “The Great Bakunawa” is delightfully madcap, with distorted resonances from a healing bowl, bongos, pitched-up piano, arps that squelch like a cartoon TV theme. Vanisher has a detuned quality redolent of Mk.gee and an ear-pleasing evanescence similar to James Blake, where Quad sounds almost phantasmic. His voice shimmers with reverb, trembling and splintering in a way that reflects the fragmented lyrics. He has a knack for expressing the casual agony of depression—“When the walls cave in on you/They become your skin,” goes a line on “At a Time Like This”—and capturing that haunted feeling with vox and instrumental flourishes.

Despite the care put into the narrative, many verses still come out hazy. One section of “Waging War” apparently portrays Quadeca getting high and envisioning the ocean parting until there’s a hallway, which he sees himself standing in; then he sobers up and the fantasy disappears, which is supposed to foreshadow the sailor’s death later in the album. Later in the song, Quadeca goes, “reverse the loop and I’m swimming forward,” which he explains as: Reverse the word “loop” and you get “pool,” and thus pool equals… swimming? Even with Genius annotations describing his thought process, they feel completely puzzling.

For an album about exploring the world, it’s pretty myopic: It centers a man painfully trapped in his own head, reliving his past mistakes, fantasizing about death, and learning to relinquish control. The constant focus on the self also distracts from the apocalyptic narrative, which could have been colored in more. There’s a similar sort of sprawling insularity that starts to sound homogenous after a full listen. He incorporates Japanese taiko drums, Chinese cymbals, mandolin, marching band percussion, trombones bludgeoned into 808s, a recording of him smashing a table but filtered so it sounds freaky—but they’re all buried and blurred together into this vaguely nautical atmosphere.

The irony of Vanisher is that Quadeca’s trying to solve the unsolvable, packaging the complexities of life and adulthood into a pat allegory about a man and an ocean that seems to contain the world. Surrendering to life would really mean something messier, unfinished, genuinely inscrutable, and out-there. Still, there are many moments where the weight of the sound and symbols disappears, and all we’re left with is a potent hit of euphoria. Quadeca and Olēka sound like twin angels on “Waging War,” willowy vocals wrapping around each other like cursive scripture. At one perfect point, Quadeca shatters into pixelated pieces, every mutilated word shadowed by cries. “I surrender to my heart,” he finally sings, and the instrumentation falls away. It sounds like giving yourself over to the waves and drifting off into the horizon.