A routine dentist visit provided the unlikely creative spark behind Tranquilizer, the latest album from Daniel Lopatin’s Oneohtrix Point Never project. The set is due Nov. 17 in digital form from Warp and four days later in physical editions. Three new songs, “For Residue,” “Bumpy” and “Lifeworld,” are out now.
Tranquilizer was also informed by the revelation that a treasured archive of sample CDs from the 1990s had disappeared from the Internet Archive. “It’s a record shaped by commercial audio construction kits from a bygone era— an index of cliches turned inside out,” Lopatin says. “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.”
Per Warp, Tranquilizer is said to conjure “a sonic hallucination: ambient calm twisting into digital chaos, mundane textures giving way to emotional overload. It’s a record shaped by obscurity and obsolescence. Real and unreal blur. Samples melt into static. A door creaks open inside a dream.”
Tranquilizer is the follow-up to 2023’s Again. In recent years, Lopatin has worked on projects with the Weeknd, Charli xcx, Iggy Pop and David Byrne, and has scored such Safdie brothers films as Uncut Gems, Good Time and the upcoming Marty Supreme.
Lopatin will support Tranquilizer with shows next month in Madrid (Nov. 7), Barcelona (Nov. 8), Braga, Portugal (Nov. 9), Prague (Nov. 10) and Helsinki (Nov. 13).
