Hi, everyone. Red Hot Chili Peppers here, the internet's busiest music nerd. It's time for a review of this new Oneohtrix Point Never album, Tranquilizer.

Here we have the 11th full-length LP of veteran electronic and experimental music producer, Daniel Lopatin, aka Oneohtrix Point Never. You could say he's an artist who's seen an incredible amount of success and notoriety despite the deeply abstract nature of his music. I mean, the guy's not exactly known for churning out chart toppers, solo anyway.

Still, he's received years of rave reviews and music publications of all types and stripes, influenced a resurgence of Y2K and New Age aesthetics in modern electronic and ambient music. Through his collage and sample-based work, he's very much credited with having started the vaporwave microgenre and subsequently everything that's sprouted off of it. But some of his most notable accomplishments have been in collaboration with other artists, whether he's working with the likes of Caroline Polachek, Arca, or Soccer Mommy, or essentially being the production ace in the hole for The Weeknd on multiple albums now. And, and, and, Daniel has been the go-to soundtrack guy for multiple Safdie Brothers films, including Josh Safdie's upcoming Marty Supreme movie.

But in the midst of all of this recent success, Daniel has still found time to keep his own work interesting. And while it is true, some of his most critically acclaimed works are 10 years old or more at this point, more recent projects like Garden of Delete, Age Of, as well as Magic Oneohtrix Point Never, saw Daniel undertaking some pretty ambitious concepts. His last LP, again, didn't operate off of nearly as many set boundaries series, though, but still featured some of Daniel's sharpest productions and ideas to date.

Tranquilizer, now, is similarly free of aesthetic and stylistic limitations, but it's said to be at least partially inspired by a recent occurrence over at the Internet Archive. I guess the loss of all these '90s sample pack CDs, which I was wholly unaware of – which if you're not a musician or a producer, you might be wondering, what? Well, for the pre-Internet and early Internet eras, these CDs that were basically jam packed with instrumental samples, loops, and percussive one-shots were notable sound sources and creative inspiration for a myriad of great songs and records. These CDs could be purchased alone or come along with some electronic music or production magazine like one of these.

Doing research for this video, I even found this music radar list for some of the best sample pack CDs of all time, one of which is this one titled Planet of the Breaks. This also makes me think back to a 2024 conversation I had with producer and DJ, Baauer. He actually brought up these types of sample pack CDs as a huge treasure trove of inspiration and sounds. Because obviously, another reason these sample pack CDs are so widely downloaded and sought after is because they were free to use if you actually had a copy, something that can't exactly be tracked effectively if you're some creator who has all the songs on their hard drive 20 years after the CD was released.

Now, from what I've seen in doing some searches for this video, it does seem like there's still a very big community-wide effort to keep these sorts of sample packs available, which isn't surprising because that is always what it has taken to make this stuff widely accessible to everyone. I guess this "scare," if you want to call it that, inspired Daniel to put some of these sounds to good use, which, I mean, isn't maybe that much of a limitation when you think about it.

Considering how broad and refined Daniel's soundplay chops are, I'm sure he could turn basically any sample into something that sounds like anything. Not to mention, when we're talking about archives of these types of sample packs, there's just so many sounds to choose from. We're talking about hundreds of gigs of loops here. I mean, if Daniel wanted, he probably could have devoted an entire record to all three volumes of Zero G's Jungle Warfare.

But yeah, unfortunately, Tranquilizer is not a jungle album. But again, it is seemingly Daniel taking all of these sounds and probably some synthesized ones as well, and turning them into about an hour of mind bending and colorful collages, all of which sound surreal and otherworldly, even in their most conventional moments.

Take, for example, the track "Cherry Blue," which at its core is a killer synth composition, tasteful and classic, like even some of Tangerine Dream's best work. There's a clear musical evolution to its chords and stuttering piano fragments. But the instrumentation itself doesn't sound at all like something that would be cooked up in your average music studio session because it just sounds too alien and dreamy to be real.

A lot of the time on this LP, it's not just about what the music is doing compositionally, but what it's evoking in terms of imagery or feelings. The song "Bumpy", for example, sounds like the final seconds of our universe ticking away on some intergalactic clock, orbited by astrobelts of starry synthesizers and creaking doors for some reason. A combo of sounds that maybe makes sense given that the intro track presents what sounds like the sound of maybe snoring and also a baby crying? Are we drifting off to dreamland here? Being born? Both?

The following track, "Lifeworld", brings a series of tribal drum loops set against crashing waves of New Age synth exotica. The whole thing sounds like the select screen on a PS1 title where the whole point of the game is to collect underwater crystals. I love the theme melody on the track, too, and the fact that it repeats and returns. However, even though there is some familiarity to this structure, the groove and loop that it all exists on is just so weird and off-kilter. I'm listening to music created on some lost ancient time signature.

I very much feel the same about the track "Modern Lust," whose weird loops of synths and beats and bass feel like I'm listening to a record the size of the Milky Way stuck on an infinite skip. Plus, some of the beautiful and mysterious dark synth passages on this track, who are very reminiscent of Daniel's Returnal era, which I thought was the case on a deeper cut on the record, "Petro", too.

Meanwhile, I felt like the off-kilter piano fragments on the song "Fear of Symmetry" were very Replica-esque. But this time around, hearing Daniel work with these same ideas with better production chops now, it all sounds much more high fidelity, not to mention the surprise funky organ passages that pop in randomly. All of these different fragments not only somehow work in to the greater scheme of each of these tracks, but a lot of them sound like little flashbacks to previous musical memories that Daniel personally has, or even just concepts and compositional modes that he's worked in on previous albums.

I love the bass and the thickness and the heaviness of the song "Vestigel". With how vast and frankly rumbling this song sounds, I feel like it could really just disintegrate me in the snap of two fingers. In the last third of this record is where Daniel really starts to put some of his collage chops to work with a lot of unlikely pairings and surprising sounds popping up here and there.

Like with the track "D. I. S." where we hear bits of cell phone interference, upright bass, and what sounds like opera vocals too. It's attention-grabbing, to say the least, even if it's not the most cohesive composition on this entire record. Then the title track on the album is packed with these watery cycling synth layers and what also sounds like maybe crickets and flicking lighters, some pitch shifted vocals and whistling too. It's a track that really lives up to its title because it does sound like a bunch of sounds that I would hear just before everything goes dark and I pass out for God knows how long.

Now, again, there are some points on these tracks that to my ears sound a bit too glitchy and deconstructed and disjointed to really feel all that gratifying. By the time they're over, I'm sitting here thinking, what? But the final two songs on this record, I think, do a fantastic job of presenting this constantly shifting and evolving palette of ideas. But they all come together so sensibly and fluidly, whether we're talking about the smooth fusion of soul and jazz on the track "Rodl Glide". Yeah, it's a very easygoing start that eventually bursts into these crazy techno passages that suddenly settle into some serene synth harmonies and it's just an edge of your seat moment, even as the woozy beats that close the track up pop in.

Then the closing track, "Waterfalls," is a truly gorgeous finish, especially with that harpsichord section that finishes the entire thing out.

Once again, I think Daniel has truly come through with one of his best records to date here. Something that, like his previous record, feels like a culmination of a lot of ideas he's been working on for years. But this time around, it feels like he's doing a better job of spinning multiple plates in terms of giving us engaging, beautiful, captivating compositions, bold, daring, and inconceivable soundplay. It's so evocative, it's so well put together, and it's so clearly skilled. Studied, is a word I would even use.

Despite all of that, Daniel is still using his talents and his experience to create tracks that frankly are super subversive and a bit slippery in terms of really being able to get a grasp of them and make heads or tails of them. Sometimes this record's random and all over the place nature can be can be a little confounding. But still, I came away from this album feeling massively impressed, which is why I'm feeling a strong 8 on it.