Los Angeles, CA · art-pop · experimental-rap · experimental hip hop · art pop

Quadeca

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Left a YouTube career behind to make genuinely ambitious, orchestral experimental rap about death and dissolution — one of the internet's great reinventions.

Quadeca is the recording name of Benjamin Fernando Barajas Lasky, born in Los Angeles on October 2, 2000. He opened a YouTube channel called QuadecaX8 in 2012, at first posting video game commentary before shifting into rap videos and freestyles around 2014, building an audience while still a teenager.

A public diss-track exchange with the YouTuber KSI in 2018, after KSI dismissed a wave of YouTube rappers as frauds, brought wider attention to Lasky's music. His response, 'Insecure,' drew millions of views within days and pulled him further into music as a serious pursuit.

He gradually shifted away from that world toward more ambitious work. His debut album Voice Memos arrived in 2019 and reached Billboard's Heatseekers and Independent Albums charts, followed in 2021 by From Me to You, released through AWAL and led by the widely praised single 'Sisyphus.'

By the early 2020s Lasky was releasing records that had little in common with his origins: I Didn't Mean to Haunt You followed in 2022, the mixtape Scrapyard arrived in 2024 with features from Brakence and Kevin Abstract, and the album Vanisher, Horizon Scraper came in 2025 with Danny Brown, Maruja and Olēka.

His later work draws on experimental hip hop, art pop and ambient production, often built from layered vocals, orchestral and choral textures, and abrupt structural shifts. Lasky writes, produces and mixes much of the material himself, and the albums tend to be conceptual, circling grief, mortality and self-erasure. The reinvention has been unusual enough that it is often discussed as much as the music itself.

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