Daniel Lopatin, the New York vaporwave wizard known as Oneohtrix Point Never, has been moving in lots of different circles for a long time now. Ever since he scored the Safdie Brothers' great 2017 film Good Time, he's been doing amazing things in that world. Ever since he worked on some of the tracks from the Weeknd's 2020 album After Hours, he has played supporting roles on big records, too. Recently, he's racked up credits on music from people like MGMT, Yung Lean, and the Weeknd. Last year, he worked with John Medeski to score the HBO series The Curse. He also scored Josh Safdie's much-hyped upcoming movie Marty Supreme. Lopatin continues to make his own head-wrecking synth music, and he'll release a new LP called Tranquilizer next month.
The last Oneohtrix Point Never album was 2023's Again. He put together follow-up album, Tranquilizer after finding that an archive of '90s sample CDs vanished from the Internet Archive. Today, he shares the new album's first three tracks: "For Residue," "Bumpy," and "Lifeworld." All of them are queasy, gasping instrumentals. "For Residue" is relatively short, and it's built on misty drones and the sound of labored breathing. "Bumpy" has nervous melodies and bursts of jittery percussion; it's got some of the late-night channel-flipping feeling of early OPN. "Lifeworld" is more beat-based but no less disorienting, and it's got a video that Lopatin directed himself.
On Spotify, those new songs are grouped together as an EP called tra. On Instagram, Oneohtrix Point Never's Electric Music Company says that he'll have new music out regularly in the next few weeks, "where Sunday meets Monday, weekly." Lopatin says, "It’s a record shaped by commercial audio construction kits from a bygone era -- an index of clichés turned inside out. It is a return to a process-oriented form of music making for me that I felt best evoked a certain kind of madness and ennui in the heart of culture today." Below, check out all three new tracks, as well as the Tranquilizer tracklist.
TRACKLIST:
01 "For Residue"
02 "Bumpy"
03 "Lifeworld"
04 "Measuring Ruins"
05 "Modern Lust"
06 "Fear Of Symmetry"
07 "Vestigel"
08 "Cherry Blue"
09 "Bell Scanner"
10 "D.I.S."
11 "Tranquilizer"
12 "Storm Show"
13 "Petro"
14 "Rodl Glide"
15 "Waterfalls"
Per Apple Music, Tranquilizer is out 11/17 on Ridge Valley Digital/Warp.
