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ONEOHTRIX POINT NEVER
Tranquilizer(Warp Records)
Add date: 11.25.2025
Release date: 11.21.2025
Links:
Apple Music
Bandcamp
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Official Website
Spotify
Tidal
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A few years ago, a massive commercial sample library vanished from The Internet Archive. Hundreds of classic sample CDs from the ‘90s and 2000s — an archive of sequences, beats, pads, and virtual instruments, soundtracking everything from Silent Hill to The X-Files — were suddenly gone. For producers and other interested parties, it was a cultural rupture, as if someone had cut a wire to the past, and the information encoded in these turn-of-the-millennium sounds threatened to disappear entirely. Thankfully, the library was eventually salvaged, ensuring the recordings remained part of the cultural record.
The story of the archive’s disappearance, and subsequent resurfacing, inspired Daniel Lopatin, producer and composer behind Oneohtrix Point Never. From this came the seed of his eleventh album, Tranquilizer — a work that imagines what it means to escape into a past of discarded sounds to exit back out into the present.
Few artists are better suited to reflect on this recovered sonic time capsule. For nearly two decades, Lopatin has been among music’s most quietly influential figures, shaping pop and experimental music from the inside out. His reframing of Korn-era aesthetics on Garden of Delete prefigured the current nu-metal revival; his early Eccojams influenced the birth of vaporwave and the ongoing retrowave boom. Beyond his solo work, he has co-produced for The Weeknd, David Byrne, Anohni, and Charli XCX and scored films for the Safdie brothers (Good Time, Uncut Gems), Panos Cosmatos (Guillermo del Toro’s Cabinet of Curiosities), and Sofia Coppola (The Bling Ring), creating some of the most distinctive sound worlds of the early twenty-first century.
Lopatin has always been drawn to the musically prosaic — sounds dismissed as marginal(ized), utilitarian, or too commercial to matter. Tranquilizer extends this fascination with forgotten media, transforming it into something visionary. Much of the record is rooted in Lopatin’s process of engaging with digital material, which he’s fed into custom software, manipulated, and “performed” in real time to craft fifteen surreal, kinetic tracks. The recovered library appealed to Lopatin not just as nostalgia, but as evidence of craft. These once-forgotten sounds were written by working musicians tasked with building sonic foley for games, ads, and corporate media — music some might call soulless. Lopatin disagrees. He believes there is spirit even in the most functional music, and that art is forged as much from discipline as inspiration. His compositional process is a testament to this belief. Like Philip K. Dick mining pulp assignments for transcendent ideas, Lopatin transforms discarded sonic fragments into an act of détournement — shaping an album that, like one of Duchamp’s readymades, reframes the familiar into something strange and new.
That same instinct — to locate spirit in what seems lifeless — carried into the chance moment that sparked Tranquilizer: a routine visit to the dentist. Lying down in the chair, a high frequency scaler vibrating through teeth, Lopatin looked up at a fluorescent light cover printed with blue skies and palm trees, a synthetic paradise taped between rows of grey office tiling. It inspired a question: What are the sounds of this world, where the mundane and the extraordinary exist in such routine and flimsy balance?
Tranquilizer isn’t the sound of sedation, but resurfacing. Lopatin isn’t condemning a need for escape but, exploring what happens after. The record maps a movement from weightless calm into something more embodied — not a hero’s journey, but the necessary cycle of withdrawal and return that keeps us sane in a world both eviscerating and mundane. We plummet from the watery bliss of “Lifeworld” into the mournful melancholy of “Cherry Blue” and spasmodic grooves of “Rodl Glide.” As always with OPN, real collides with unreal. Listen closely and you will hear the scrape of fingers on a fretboard, a stone sliding across a dungeon floor, the squeak of a door opening. His music has never been an abstract color field; it has weight, edges, shadows. If R Plus Seven was all crystalline arpeggiators and Garden of Delete a feverish upchuck of gurgling synths, Tranquilizer feels like falling out of a dream you can still touch.
Even the album’s cover — a painting by Indiana-based artist Abner Hershberger — reflects this balance of the surreal and the concrete. At first glance, the painting is pure abstraction, but Hershberger’s work reimagines the North Dakota and Midwest flatlands of his Mennonite upbringing on a farm. Look closely at the cover and you can see harvesting blades cutting into the earth, grass parted into swaths. Hershberger’s approach echoes Lopatin’s own on Tranquilizer: recording the output of his software explorations and performing it in real time, to bring the latent rhythm and kineticism of its hearth to the surface. Tranquilizer draws on lost sounds to ask what we’ve left behind, and still, what we bring back when we resurface. It’s a reminder that even music nearly erased from history can reverberate in its hidden depths, and that the journey through the unreal can return us to the world more awake than before.
Apple Music
Bandcamp
Official Website
Spotify
Tidal
Warp
YouTube
A few years ago, a massive commercial sample library vanished from The Internet Archive. Hundreds of classic sample CDs from the ‘90s and 2000s — an archive of sequences, beats, pads, and virtual instruments, soundtracking everything from Silent Hill to The X-Files — were suddenly gone. For producers and other interested parties, it was a cultural rupture, as if someone had cut a wire to the past, and the information encoded in these turn-of-the-millennium sounds threatened to disappear entirely. Thankfully, the library was eventually salvaged, ensuring the recordings remained part of the cultural record.
The story of the archive’s disappearance, and subsequent resurfacing, inspired Daniel Lopatin, producer and composer behind Oneohtrix Point Never. From this came the seed of his eleventh album, Tranquilizer — a work that imagines what it means to escape into a past of discarded sounds to exit back out into the present.
Few artists are better suited to reflect on this recovered sonic time capsule. For nearly two decades, Lopatin has been among music’s most quietly influential figures, shaping pop and experimental music from the inside out. His reframing of Korn-era aesthetics on Garden of Delete prefigured the current nu-metal revival; his early Eccojams influenced the birth of vaporwave and the ongoing retrowave boom. Beyond his solo work, he has co-produced for The Weeknd, David Byrne, Anohni, and Charli XCX and scored films for the Safdie brothers (Good Time, Uncut Gems), Panos Cosmatos (Guillermo del Toro’s Cabinet of Curiosities), and Sofia Coppola (The Bling Ring), creating some of the most distinctive sound worlds of the early twenty-first century.
Lopatin has always been drawn to the musically prosaic — sounds dismissed as marginal(ized), utilitarian, or too commercial to matter. Tranquilizer extends this fascination with forgotten media, transforming it into something visionary. Much of the record is rooted in Lopatin’s process of engaging with digital material, which he’s fed into custom software, manipulated, and “performed” in real time to craft fifteen surreal, kinetic tracks. The recovered library appealed to Lopatin not just as nostalgia, but as evidence of craft. These once-forgotten sounds were written by working musicians tasked with building sonic foley for games, ads, and corporate media — music some might call soulless. Lopatin disagrees. He believes there is spirit even in the most functional music, and that art is forged as much from discipline as inspiration. His compositional process is a testament to this belief. Like Philip K. Dick mining pulp assignments for transcendent ideas, Lopatin transforms discarded sonic fragments into an act of détournement — shaping an album that, like one of Duchamp’s readymades, reframes the familiar into something strange and new.
That same instinct — to locate spirit in what seems lifeless — carried into the chance moment that sparked Tranquilizer: a routine visit to the dentist. Lying down in the chair, a high frequency scaler vibrating through teeth, Lopatin looked up at a fluorescent light cover printed with blue skies and palm trees, a synthetic paradise taped between rows of grey office tiling. It inspired a question: What are the sounds of this world, where the mundane and the extraordinary exist in such routine and flimsy balance?
Tranquilizer isn’t the sound of sedation, but resurfacing. Lopatin isn’t condemning a need for escape but, exploring what happens after. The record maps a movement from weightless calm into something more embodied — not a hero’s journey, but the necessary cycle of withdrawal and return that keeps us sane in a world both eviscerating and mundane. We plummet from the watery bliss of “Lifeworld” into the mournful melancholy of “Cherry Blue” and spasmodic grooves of “Rodl Glide.” As always with OPN, real collides with unreal. Listen closely and you will hear the scrape of fingers on a fretboard, a stone sliding across a dungeon floor, the squeak of a door opening. His music has never been an abstract color field; it has weight, edges, shadows. If R Plus Seven was all crystalline arpeggiators and Garden of Delete a feverish upchuck of gurgling synths, Tranquilizer feels like falling out of a dream you can still touch.
Even the album’s cover — a painting by Indiana-based artist Abner Hershberger — reflects this balance of the surreal and the concrete. At first glance, the painting is pure abstraction, but Hershberger’s work reimagines the North Dakota and Midwest flatlands of his Mennonite upbringing on a farm. Look closely at the cover and you can see harvesting blades cutting into the earth, grass parted into swaths. Hershberger’s approach echoes Lopatin’s own on Tranquilizer: recording the output of his software explorations and performing it in real time, to bring the latent rhythm and kineticism of its hearth to the surface. Tranquilizer draws on lost sounds to ask what we’ve left behind, and still, what we bring back when we resurface. It’s a reminder that even music nearly erased from history can reverberate in its hidden depths, and that the journey through the unreal can return us to the world more awake than before.