Quadeca's Life 1 keeps switching shapes and mostly earns it

Life 1 does not sit still. Quadeca's fifth album, out October 1 on his own X8 Music, runs 14 tracks and 48 minutes through flamenco guitar, jazz voicings, distorted breathing, guitar drones, an acoustic folk song and a dance single. Most of those turns land; the one that doesn't is still worth going back to.

He is Benjamin Fernando Barajas Lasky, born in Los Angeles on October 2, 2000, better known as Quadeca. The channel came first, QuadecaX8, opened in 2012, video games and FIFA and then freestyles; a 2018 diss track answering KSI's callout of YouTube rappers reached further than the videos had. Voice Memos arrived in 2019, From Me to You in 2021 under AWAL, I Didn't Mean to Haunt You in 2022. Then the 2024 mixtape Scrapyard, with Brakence and Kevin Abstract, and Vanisher, Horizon Scraper in July 2025, a concept album about a sailor with a companion film and a tour behind it, and the first release on X8 Music after he left DeadAir. Life 1 keeps the ambition and drops the plot.

The album was teased in March 2026 with an Instagram post he later deleted, saying he thought he would call it Life 1. Four singles followed: Dark Magic in May, with a video directed and edited by Quadeca and Brendon Burton; Baby Steps in June; Hell of a Time in July, the same day he announced a 22-date North American tour that starts October 10 in Mesa and ends November 10 in Los Angeles; and the title track in September. Festival sets at Fuji Rock and Lollapalooza fit in between. Like You Always Do was written in Pine Valley, Utah, and played live at Kilby Block Party in May, months before anyone outside that field could hear it. One guest turns up, the Canadian musician Kmoe.

Life 1 (where did the time go) opens with jazz, synths and flamenco-style guitar under vocal harmonies doing pop chorus work, roomy and bright out of the gate. Dark Magic then slams the door: distorted breathing, abrasive guitar drones, and warm electric piano chords sitting where they should not, absurd on purpose and better for it. The album keeps making that jump.

Baby Steps is where the other half appears, hip-hop, indie rock and folk folded together, Quadeca singing over acoustic guitar instead of rapping through a filter. Hell of a Time answers with a dance track built on drum presets that are meant to sound fake, ending in an orchestral swell. Around them the sequencing is uneven: CELERY and THE GAMBLER flick past as fragments, while Illusion of Choice stretches to 5:33, the longest thing here. The short pieces work as hinges, and they spend two of the 14 slots.

Follow him from the freestyles and the range is the payoff, with the singing as the surprise: he carries the acoustic songs without sounding like he wandered in from a different record. Arriving cold, take Dark Magic and Baby Steps back to back; together they prove the two halves belong to the same person. Next to anything from the lane of rappers who picked up guitars, it holds. Come expecting bars and it will feel like he is dodging the fight.

Hell of a Time is the miss. The artificial presets flatten the song instead of sharpening it, and the orchestral swell at the end feels bolted on, a scale the track never asked for. The fragments cost something too: two track slots spent on mood only work when everything around them tightens, and here they mostly sit as texture.

That leaves Life 1 at 3.5: a record that lands the opener, the drone pivot and the acoustic turn, and fumbles the dance single. The range is the method; the missteps come with moving this fast. He turns 26 the day after it came out and he is still changing his handwriting between songs. Skip Hell of a Time. Keep the rest.

The tracklist

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