"Rooted in a chance moment, a routine visit to the dentist, lying beneath a fluorescent panel of blue skies and palm trees, Oneohtrix Point Never's Tranquilizer is a surreal, deeply textural record that asks what it means to escape into the past, and what we return to after. The album was sparked by Lopatin’s discovery that a vast archive of 90s sample CDs had vanished from the Internet Archive, a moment that left Lopatin creatively charged.

Drawing from those salvaged sounds, Tranquilizer conjures 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. This is Oneohtrix Point Never at his most immersive, not looking back with nostalgia, but reframing lost sound as a vessel for new emotion. Speaking about the record, Lopatin says: “It’s a record shaped by commercial audio construction kits from a bygone era— an index of cliches 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.”

Alongside the announcement, Lopatin reveals Tranquilizer’s cover art: a painting by Indiana-based artist Abner Hershberger, whose abstract-yet-earthy work reimagines the North Dakota flatlands of his Mennonite upbringing. His visual language, rooted in forgotten materials and agricultural landscapes, mirrors the record’s own themes of decay, memory, and craft.

Over the past two decades, Lopatin has become one of the most quietly influential figures in modern music. His early Eccojams helped spark the vaporwave movement; albums like R Plus Seven and Garden of Delete redefined ambient and experimental music for the digital age. Beyond his solo work, he has scored acclaimed films for the Safdie brothers (Uncut Gems, Good Time, Marty Supreme), and collaborated with The Weeknd, Charli XCX, Iggy Pop, David Byrne, and Anohni.

With Tranquilizer, he offers not a sedative escape but a conscious return."

Warp, 2025