Oneohtrix Point Never - Tranquilizer Oneohtrix Point Never

Album of the Week: Oneohtrix Point Never – Tranquillizer

Staff Review

When American electronic producer Oneohtrix Point Never (Daniel Lopatin) first gained attention in the late ’00s, it was through early releases such as Betrayed in the Octagon, Zones Without People and Russian Mind, later collected on the excellent Rifts (2010) compilation. Working largely with an inherited Roland Juno-60, Lopatin conjured a retro-futurist swirl of ambient, new age and psychedelic space-music. Around the same period he released the cult plunderphonic set Chuck Person’s Eccojams Vol. 1, which stretched and degraded fragments of pop (Chris De Burgh’s Lady in Red, Fleetwood Mac’s Only Over You) into ghostly, emotionally heightened echoes of their originals. From the start, Lopatin was fascinated by resurrecting sounds of the past as an exploration of memory and time and his work often resembled the hauntological, filled with familiar sonic ghosts made strange.

Across the 2010s he delivered some of electronic music’s most acclaimed records (Replica, R Plus Seven), later expanding into film scoring with the Safdie Brothers’ Good Time (2017) and Uncut Gems (2019), and somewhat unexpectedly aiding the production process and shaping the sound of The Weeknd’s After Hours, Dawn FM and Hurry Up Tomorrow. This week Lopatin returns as Oneohtrix Point Never with his new album, Tranquillizer.

Constructed entirely from commercial sample CD libraries sourced on Internet Archive, alongside ROMpler presets, Tranquillizer marks a return to the aesthetic terrain of Rifts, Replica and R Plus Seven. These found and sourced sounds are meticulously manipulated, collaged and intertwined into an atmospheric, deeply immersive sound-world. Nothing here feels choreographed or predictable. Instead, Lopatin extracts the oddest and most evocative textures from the archive, crafting a palette that is detailed, uncanny and emotionally resonant. When a more recognisable piano line or vocal snippet surfaces, its impact is magnified by the surrounding restraint.

In lesser hands, such an approach could easily become overcooked, but Lopatin focuses on the very idea of memory in all of its blurry, half-there nature, drifting between clarity and distortion. Tranquillizer mirrors this beautifully as motifs slip in and out, dissolve, reappear, and merge. Tracks frequently fuse together with glitching interference as if guided by alchemical forces both digital and mechanical. The album glides with an ethereal, supernatural temperament, submerging the listener in an ocean of shifting, bottomless sonics. Throughout this remarkable work you will encounter blissful synthesized, strobing electronics, exotic percussive breaks, environmental sound snippets, reverb-drenched vocal sighs, swells of ruinous digital noise, and woozily contemplative melancholia. Built piece by piece, sample by sample, it stands as one of Lopatin’s most tactile, approachable and purely pleasurable works in some time.

The existential essence of life, of being, of having been, is present throughout Tranquillizer. Drawing on key moments from across Lopatin’s career yet transcending them, it results in a landmark release, one that is haunting, emotional, and totally transportive.

“Tranquilizer isn’t the sound of sedation but resurfacing. Lopatin isn’t condemning our need for escape but, rather, exploring what happens after. The record maps a movement from weightless calm into something more grounded — not a hero’s journey, but the necessary cycle of withdrawal and return that keeps us sane in a world both overwhelming and mundane. We plummet from the watery bliss of “Lifeworld” into the mournful melancholy of “Cherry Blue” and twisted grooves of “Rodl Glide.” As always with OPN, the real collides with the 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 colour field; it has weight, edges, shadows. If R Plus Seven was all crystalline arpeggiators and Garden of Delete was a feverish upchuck of gurgling synths, Tranquilizer feels like falling out of a dream you can still touch”