“My sailing instructor was insane. He’s an 80-year-old daredevil who’s had open heart surgery and drinks Monster Energy every day. He has a roster of many women that text him every time he’s sailing. He’s a total character. He immediately was like ‘You’re the worst at tying knots I’ve ever seen. Clearly you weren’t a Boy Scout,’” Lasky says. “But when I was filming on a boat, and I wasn’t actually sailing, it looked like I was a tourist! It looked almost luxurious, and that looked stupid – it needs to reflect the journey, and it needs to feel treacherous. All the little details make it immersive. I think it’s one of the most important human lessons – if you just do something enough, you can do it.”

Lasky is no stranger to concept albums. His last, 2022’s I Didn’t Mean to Haunt You, was told from the perspective of a ghost who had taken its own life, now observing loved ones and reckoning with the decision. While elements of Lasky’s latest story do draw from his own life – many of the more emotional tracks find the narrator dealing with a breakup through the lens of rough seas, total isolation out in the water, and a tough journey undertaken alone, leading to discoveries about what makes life worthwhile – a major catalyst behind selecting the oceanic theme was from a sonic standpoint.

“The idea of an ocean voyage is so ripe with imagery and symbolism – this idea that you’re in this vessel at the whim of nature. The ocean is very rhythmic – it waves, it pulls in and out. The environment is very musical,” he says. “The actual music itself is very weird. It goes all over the place: I’m borrowing from Brazilian music, I love bossa nova, but I’m using Indian and African drums. So I liked the idea of the location of the album being the sea, where it’s not bound to any land, it’s going everywhere.”

At certain points on the album, Lasky does take a break from his more emotionally affecting themes to have a little more fun – to which he’s very curious about his audience’s responses. On one more rap-heavy track, “The Great Bakunawa,” he recruits Danny Brown to play a character for the second time. On Haunt You, Brown stepped into the role of deadly carbon monoxide gas. Now, he embodies a mythological Filipino sea dragon, known for eating the moon.

“That’s what I love about Danny – we were working on his album, and I was like ‘Look, I have this song, it’s about like a Filipino sea dragon that the character from the album encounters as this apocalyptic deity.’ He’s like ‘Say less.’ He did a verse in like an hour, wrote it out, researched it, knew all the correct lore,” Lasky says. “It’s a little more whimsical. I’m not going to try to be cool, or try to make it ambiguous, it’s gonna be directly a song about a fucking sea dragon. I’m just gonna embody that in every way.”

When it comes to audience response, Lasky is well aware of online debates that crop up around albums like Lil Yachty’s Let’s Start Here, or other projects where those who originated in the world of hip-hop expand into the creation of maximalist, genre-spanning epics, sometimes mentioning the goal of trying to prove themselves as “real artists.” Make no mistake – Lasky still loves hip-hop.

“It happened around my previous albums, this idea of ‘Oh, he evolved past rap, so now he’s good.’ That’s stupid. I’m still super inspired by hip-hop, and the songs that are rap songs are just as layered and artistically dense and complex as the songs that are more folk,” he says. “I didn’t do it with the intent of proving that, I just like making what I like making. I never want anyone to get the idea that I’m genre switching to get a new audience. I’m actually genre switching many times at the expense of my audience! So, it’s a little different.”

Vanisher, Horizon Scraper has been in the works for a couple of years – Lasky even put out an interim project, Scrapyard, in 2024, that consisted of tracks that didn’t make the cut for either Haunt You or the planned new project. The collection of “scraps” still ended up on a couple notable year-end lists. If you ask Lasky, though, he’s been imagining that he could create a project like this one since he was making YouTube videos in his childhood home. He just had to amass the skillset first. In a similar way, he has quite a few plans for the future.

“[The kid making FIFA rap videos] would be like ‘Damn, I’m glad you figured out how to make those songs that I wanted to make.’ Growing up, I’d listen to these bossa nova songs, and I’d be like ‘I have no idea how to make that, but I would love to express myself like that one day.’ I think he would be proud and appreciative that I tried enough to do it,” he says. “I’ve always made music with the idea that I could go anywhere, and that I would like to go anywhere, and so that’s my goal for the future: to just keep going. Every album I put out, I want there to be the idea of ‘This is the best one’ every single time. That makes it harder for me every time, but if not, then what’s the point?”