Quadeca - I Didn’t Mean To Haunt You ALBUM REVIEW

Shoutout Hivemind.


Right off the bat, I’ll say that I didn’t expect this from Quadeca. The section of YouTuber-turned-musicians that are on my radar are pretty big, especially since I upload on YouTube. Of course, there’s Joji who successfully made the jump, but there are other YouTubers that happen to make music like KSI that really just don’t hit hard to me. Quadeca’s last album, From Me To You, really set up some potential for Quadeca to be a pretty successful YouTuber-to-rapper jump and I still enjoy that project today. His latest release, I Didn’t Mean To Haunt You, leans into a much more experimental and ambitious project. I plan to watch the accompanying visual album too, but it’s just been busy. So, let’s just get into it.

So, if I didn’t make it obvious, this project is a whole different beast compared to the other Quadeca projects I’ve heard. This is much more of an art pop album with some alternative R&B, experimental rap, and even a little tinge of industrial thrown in there. It’s pretty impressive to see the jump in sound so quickly, especially since I went into this project blind without hearing any of the singles. I’ve had to sit with this project for a while, mainly because of just how much there is to unpack from this. As I said earlier, there’s a visual component to this album, and even though I haven’t watched it yet, I’m sure that there’s more to the concept and story here, but here’s what I could gleam from it: It feels like that Quadeca died and is a ghost, moving through all the stages of grief and realizing that he’s dead and won’t be able to come back. After giving it another listen with that in mind, it all came together into something pretty special.

The music itself, though, is still wild. It’s fittingly haunting and there are just moments where I just want to sit down and just decompose to what I’m listening to. The entire project is produced by Quadeca himself, and it’s a huge step up, even from his last project, which already had some amazing production. There are moments on here that I could say are genuinely scary, especially the closing track “cassini’s division” with Thor Harris of Swans fame where the entire track just breaks down into a stutter and fades into oblivion. The Danny Brown-featuring “house settling” is just so demented to listen to, and even comes to match some of the best of Brown’s career-highs. “born yesterday” and “tell me a joke” are some of the best songs of the year as well, which is probably what I’d say about a good amount of the other tracks, especially “knots.”

Yeah, it’s kind of tough to put into words how much I love this. I Didn’t Mean To Haunt You is a mind-melting, jaw-dropping project that not a lot of projects can match. While it does have one or two hiccups, Quadeca puts everything into this project and it’ll stick with me for a long time. More likely, it’ll haunt me.


9/10


Listen here

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Apple Music

YouTube




I Didn’t Mean To Haunt You is a deadAIR release.

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