A decade and a half ago, Daniel Lopatin spent what might be the best hundred bucks of his life on a stack of bootleg DVDs: Saturday-morning cartoons, daytime soaps, late-night cable ads, each one soaked in VHS fuzz and chintzy synths. He didn’t even watch them—he ripped the audio straight into his sampler, letting the fragments of Wrigley’s gum jingles, Hershey’s chocolate spots, and Alphagetti commercials collide into something entirely new. The result was Replica, a labyrinthine suite of ambient-expressionist fugues, eerie, elegiac, and impossibly precise, a work that positioned Lopatin—already Oneohtrix Point Never—as a collector of the cultural leftover, the overlooked, and the uncanny.
Tranquilizer, his latest record under the OPN name, follows a familiar impulse. In the early 2020s, Lopatin bookmarked a trove of commercial sample CDs on the Internet Archive. They vanished. When they reappeared years later, their impermanence became part of their allure. “I wanted to capture the emotional register of an era where everything is archived but perpetually slipping away,” he explained. Like Magic Oneohtrix Point Never or Again, Tranquilizer is rooted in Lopatin’s archival obsession, yet it’s less concept-heavy than those predecessors—or the labyrinthine mythology of Age Of and Garden of Delete. Instead, it trades narrative for flow, intuition for esoteric rigor, and in doing so, it may be his most immediately pleasurable album in years.
The album opens with wind, faint chimes, and a languid 12-string strum. A gurgling, pitched-down voice intones, “For residue”—a toast to the detritus of memory. Synthetic pads swell, a chorus of voices rises from the deep, and somewhere in the mix are seagulls, crying babies, or perhaps nothing recognizable at all. From there, the record unfolds like weather: Lifeworld introduces scattered percussion that conjures infinite monkeys on infinite typewriters before bursting into a gooey, ecstatic surge reminiscent of Since I Left You, filtered through Lopatin’s signature chaos. Piano, harp, cinematic strings, jingling bells, creaking doors, bowed double bass, dog barks—these sounds collide, evaporate, and repeat with relentless energy.
The density is staggering. Tracks evolve in real time, textures overlapping, mutating, vanishing. Yet despite the abundance, Tranquilizer never feels oppressive or gimmicky. Its arrangements speak fluently, with a grammar of pulse and tone that carries the listener without ever needing a conventional hook. The record balances chaos and calm, nostalgia and futurism, drifting between ambient washes and the occasional cinematic flourish with astonishing nimbleness.
Moments of pure emotional resonance abound. The limpid pianos of “Cherry Blue” evoke Cocteau Twins’ dream-pop shimmer, while “Modern Lust” cradles muted jazz trumpet like fragile cargo. “Measuring Ruins” and “Fear of Symmetry” explore sci-fi synth landscapes and Jon Hassell-like ambient funk. Highlight “D.I.S.” stretches into elastic, trance-like grooves, a testament to Lopatin’s mastery of tension and release. Humor creeps in on “Rodl Glide,” where three minutes of ghostly R&B erupt into a confounding, rave-like detour that briefly feels hijacked by another artist entirely. The closing track, “Waterfalls,” collages rushing rainsticks, jazz-fusion soprano sax, mallet arps, harpsichord, and tabla, a kaleidoscopic finale that underscores Lopatin’s playfulness and delight in sound.
Where Replica was haunted, Tranquilizer is buoyant. It acknowledges the fragility of memory, the ephemerality of cultural artifacts, but never with heaviness or cynicism. Lopatin doesn’t lament the disappearing archive; he revels in it, harvesting what he can while he can. The album is a celebration of sound’s infinite malleability, a map of the past that feels uncannily of the present, and a reminder that the best electronic music can be both dizzyingly complex and immediately exhilarating.
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