Oneohtrix Point Never - Tranquilizer (2025)
gliding - november 17, 2025
Have you ever gone onto the Wayback Machine, found a really old capture of a cool-looking website, and started flipping through the captures close to it? Adware creeps in, some images load while others fail, whole javascript elements shift, break, and then fix themselves. While trying to find the perfect instance of this site captured in its entirety, you end up finding a lot of imperfect clones that have really interesting flaws. Sometimes captures get overwritten by redirects, sending you to a completely different point in time, different identity, different design, resetting your progress. That ever-shifting journey through impermanence, temporality and link rot feels just a little bit like the adventure that Tranquilizer takes you on.
So, Daniel’s back. I could paraphrase this entire review with a simple “when you find out your GOAT still has it,” but honestly, I’ve been an Oneohtrix Point Never truther for as long as I can remember. I still love Magic, warts and all, and utterly adore the fusions in style of Again even as those albums seemingly tumble into the background of his discography. So while this isn’t a sudden drastic return to form at all for me, it’s coming from a different place completely. Again’s whole concept was about looping back to his old style and uniting it with where he is now in life. Somehow, though, Tranquilizer, with its total abandonment of concept, feels like the true grand return. I haven’t felt this utterly mesmerized by any album, let alone one under the OPN name, for the better part of a decade.
The ocean opened up by this thing is full of color and life and yet somehow, well, tranquil. How can an album this dense, disjointed and chaotic, be so calming? It’s a transcendental beast that finds all the best spots in shade even if it can’t sit still. It’s like that bench surrounded by vines and greenery just off a busy street, letting the breeze and the latent humidity fight each other as you meditate through the business that surrounds you. It’s living in the utopian CGI mockups for never-realized megaprojects. It’s the sunlight that feels warmer through the glass of the atrium than it does outside.
Speaking of the sun, it can’t be overstated how bright Tranquilizer is. This is Daniel’s warmest album in a long time, if ever. Given how a lot of his best works are remarkable in their cold, airy nature (or, in the case of Replica, even colder when exposed to their own haziness), it’s no small feat. Synths still easily shatter and crackle, but there’s a joy and sparkle to them now. Those disjointed vocals that used to unsettle on R Plus Seven only help you to ascend further into the clouds this time around. It’s humid, yes, but like you’re laying in a meadow, not lost in rotted concrete. Well, maybe there is some concrete. But it looks different when out in the open like this.
Of course, there’s what passes as a left hook on this gentle giant. OPN goes IDM and the world is better for it. “Rodl Glide” is the most shocking turn in genre under this name since Daniel started singing for the first time. The subdued soundscape of the rest of the album suddenly gives way to a wildly infectious beat that then implodes into magic. It’s entrancing and utterly effortless in getting you to bob along under its spell as it shapeshifts into further unrecognizable forms. I don’t think there’s a single other reference point in the OPN discography for anything that sounds like it, but I certainly have a new addition to my wishlist on where he should take his sound in the future.
In passing, I like using “alive” a lot in describing albums to people around me. That’s a definition that changes every time I say it, but it’s more apt for Tranquilizer than just about anything else. This album breathes, moves, and I’m pretty sure it’ll even nuzzle your hand should you reach out to touch it. This album is alive. And, just like the best of Daniel’s work, I cannot believe it’s real.
grey and green and blue and yellow