Oneohtrix Point Never is searching for soul in the slop

“We’re standing on shaky ground,” says Oneohtrix Point Never (the musician also known as Daniel Lopatin). He’s speaking to Dazed in the run-up to the release of his latest album, Tranquilizer, which is about decay and madness and the “inevitability of soulfulness” in a culture that seems bent on stamping it out. What he calls “shaky ground” could refer to many aspects of life in 2025, but he’s actually zeroing in on the carefully-constructed identities that people adopt on the internet. The “millennial condition” shares a point of view with the control freak, he suggests. “I think most people try to egoically hang on to this idea that they can form a perfect picture of their lives.” But things don’t really work like that, on social media or anywhere else. “Raw realities commingle with technology in funny ways.” The earth slips out from beneath us when we least expect it.

Tranquilizer takes one such experience as its starting point. For a long time, Lopatin had been collecting a vast online archive of sounds lifted from 90s sample CDs, earmarked for a future project. “It’s a record I knew I was going to make one day... but I didn’t really have the framework for it in my mind,” he says. What he did have was around 500 gigabytes of audio bookmarked in his browser – until he returned one day, between projects, to find that the samples had vanished. The old myth, that everything on the internet lasts forever, crumbled under the weight of digital decay.

Another formative moment came at the dentist. During a routine treatment, Lopatin was gazing up at a fluorescent light cover patterned with blue skies and palm trees, and was captured by the “escapist”, romanticised moments that exist in flux with our banal, everyday reality. Together, the two experiences “came together in some sort of weird dance” that inspired him to start work on the record in earnest, he explains, which involved improvising with sounds that he managed to rescue from the 90s sample CDs, and exploring the “chance events” that occurred when he put them together.

If the link between these artefacts of a faded technology and Lopatin’s visit to the dentist aren’t immediately clear, they take shape across the course of the album itself, which veers between mournful ambience and thudding missives from an unrealised utopia (see: “Cherry Blue” and the accompanying music video by Pol Taburet, versus “Measuring Ruins” featuring visuals by Yoshi Sodeoka). Going back to those salvaged samples, the sounds on Tranquilizer were largely designed for commercial projects like adverts and video games, churned out by the thousands in an age before we could simply click a button and get AI to do all the work. In a sense, much of this work resulted in a kind of “proto-slop” says Lopatin, but his interest lay in finding the places where the humanity of the sound designer – or what we might call “soul” – shines through.

“Unavoidably, we always find our way back to our souls,” he suggests, which has been a core theme across many of his projects, from R Plus Seven to Age Of. On Tranquilizer, he showcases that journey across 15 tracks and several decades, reshaping the sonic grunt work of the past into something that speaks to the human soul in the present and the near future, at a time when it feels like we need it more than ever.

Below, Lopatin tells us more about Tranquilizer, plus his upcoming soundtrack for Josh Safdie’s Marty Supreme.

Why do you think you’re so drawn to the internet as a subject, and the way we interact with it as human beings?

Daniel Lopatin: I’m curious about how the tools seem to be surfaces from which we project our desires. The internet is a sort of forum for understanding where our interests and desires lie, which has really always been interesting to me, probably because I wasn’t inclined to... I wasn’t hiking or swimming, or doing all these other things. I was completely obsessed with my computer. So that was just the best available technology for me to think about the deeper questions. If I had been a different kind of artist, a painter, or an athlete, maybe I would have found the same questions interesting, just reflected off of a different activity.

Do you think music can speak to the internet in any unique ways, compared with these other activities?

Daniel Lopatin: That’s an interesting question... To me, music at its best is like the Zone in Stalker [the 1979 film by Andrei Tarkovsky]. You enter into a headspace, an altered state of consciousness, to experience something that profoundly shifts your sense of time. It’s almost like a form of guided meditation. And it’s something I always thought of as a secret space, whether that was wearing headphones, or as a kid closing the door because I didn’t want my parents to hear what I was listening to. It was a private experience, a communication between me and the artist.

Music at its best is like the Zone in Stalker. You enter into an altered state of consciousness – Daniel Lopatin

The experience [of music] shifted with the shift in formats over the last 20, 30 years. You go from: ‘I’m going to make this big decision to buy a record for 12 bucks, if I’m lucky,’ to, ‘Wow, I can have every single song for $1,’ to, ‘It’s basically a free-for-all.’ You’re ripping an album into pieces, and the way that translates on the internet is very clear. It’s an image-driven culture, so music and image are inexorably connected, and fashion and music, and all that stuff. It changes it.

The visuals for ‘Measuring Ruins’ by Yoshi Sodeoka are a great example of that convergence. How did that come about?

Daniel Lopatin: Yoshi is one of the all-time great video artists. He did a very short piece for Magic Oneohtrix Point Never in 2020, but I had been familiar with his work for a really long time because he was close with [Magic Oneohtrix Point Never cover artist] Robert Beatty.

I think of Yoshi as an extremely musical video artist, because he’s a musician too, and that gives him a really firm sense of rhythm and time. When it comes to cutting visuals to music, he just picks up on all of the nuances. He’s able to really comprehend, on a granular level, what is happening in my music, where some of the stuff is pretty... you have to lock in, and the whole sort of thing will blossom in your mind. I knew he was gonna nail it.

He also speaks to a contemporary sense that reality is, as you say, on ‘shaky ground’.

Daniel Lopatin: Yeah, he reveals the guts, the plumbing. A lot of people who are immersed in experimental music pick up on the sort of casually implied music of reality. They hear beautiful, harmonious things happening in nature, and the discordant things that are happening as well. Yoshi’s like an antenna. He’s tuned in.

You’ve often reimagined lost ‘low brow’ media in your work, and on Tranquilizer you talk a lot about imbuing these commercial sounds with a sense of ‘soul’. What does that mean to you?

Daniel Lopatin: There’s a really amazing Philip K Dick story that was never finished, because he died before he got to complete it, called The Owl in Daylight. It’s about an alien species for whom music is tantamount to God, but they can’t experience sound. It’s just not in their physiology. So they basically find this B-movie composer on Earth – a more or less mediocre composer, by his own admission – and [offer] him a kind of Faustian bargain. They’re like: ‘We’re going to turn you into the greatest composer to ever live, but you’re going to suffer, because we’re going to fuse with you, and through you we’re going to experience music.’ He takes the deal, and that’s all we really know about the story.

That was a tangent, but it was one of the little details that got me going on the record... I was obsessed with finding out everything I could about this unwritten Philip K Dick story. I was thinking a lot about jinglemakers and sound designers. And my algorithm – I’m as internet addicted as anybody else – was all about jinglemaking and video game scores, and people doing explainer videos about how to recreate drum and bass intros and all this stuff. These are terrible, terrible videos. But occasionally, here and there, you get a little inkling of the person’s life, like a cat walks through the background, or you hear some muddled thing, or you sense something that they’re trying at all costs to avoid, with all their hand-waving and all the bullshit they do for the video to kick the serotonin on in your mind, and you catch them being kind of beautifully human.

The inevitability of soulfulness, under duress, and in the face of a really bland, ubiquitous slop culture, is in line with stuff that Oneohtrix Point Never has been about since the beginning – Daniel Lopatin

As someone who’s trying to make music that’s inclusive of all aspects of reality, it occurred to me that it would be interesting to think of the album as a sort of love letter to The Owl in Daylight. What if I had ended up sitting there, making drum and bass packs in the early 2000s? What would my life have been like? Could I possibly have made something great anyway, and had a sort of spiritual communion with the music, even if I’d basically been hired to make proto-slop? Going through those sample CDs, I found all these little moments that felt really personal. And I think that the inevitability of soulfulness – under duress, and in the face of a really bland, ubiquitous slop culture – is in line with stuff that Oneohtrix Point Never has been about since the beginning.

It’s interesting that slop has become synonymous with AI, whereas, as you point out, humans have been making slop for a very long time.

Daniel Lopatin: Yeah, slop is what we do. I think slop is an awesome word for it, but it’s particular to AI, unless you woke up yesterday.

So where do you draw the line between slop and soulfulness? Or how can you transition from one to the other?

Daniel Lopatin: Through effort, and through having some dignity and integrity. It’s truly a belief I have – it’s not just optimism – that people can’t completely avoid themselves, and can’t just be overtaken by numbness. I actually believe people inevitably find something good in whatever they’re experiencing. But that’s not to say it just happens. I think you fight for it. It’s a struggle, looking underneath all this stuff, trying to find something that’s more alive. You try to find a reason for yourself to kind of navigate all this shit, because it’s unavoidable. You’re never escaping it. 

But all that techno utopianist stuff... in what world to could any anybody think that we’re going to be saved by technology? It’s like thinking that horses are going to save you. The horse is going to take you where you need to go, but you still need somewhere to go. This kind of incessant belief in the vacuum of Silicon Valley that you can gamify productivity, that you can gamify meditation, that you can gamify God in the form of AI, and you can basically just approach it like you would fucking Pac-Man, is just naive, it’s just silly. The only way that you’re gonna get anywhere is you’re gonna fight, and that fight is within you. It’s not about escape, it’s a confrontation. What do you really what do you really believe in? What do you really want your world to look like? 

Speaking about our relationship with tech, you must have gone pretty deep to find the samples for Tranquilizer. What does that process look like?

Daniel Lopatin: I think there’s a sort of submissive way to go about all of this stuff, where you’re just kind of like, ‘Ok, these ones seem cool, let’s work with this’. But I was really interested in another kind of submission, which was submission to, like, the bad stuff. 

There were folders and folders of hi-hats and snares that are completely useless on the surface, but when you’re hearing them all in succession, hearing them as fluid moving through time, you’re hearing somebody’s hard work of ripping these hi-hats from a bunch of drum machines in 1997. But you’re hearing them in hyper-speed, and it’s sort of like a crude, concretised, fossilised, hyperobject view of this person’s work. Once I wrapped my head around that, like, ‘Oh yeah, I’m not trying to find a good snare, I’m trying to make these weird sculptures out of the putty of all of this crap,’ then the record was locked in for me.

I’m just so tired of this slow, grim slide or gradual chipping away of reality, reality being consumed or subsumed by simulations and concepts and surfaces... I think we’re all looking around saying: ‘Where is God?’ – Daniel Lopatin

When you say ‘hyperobject’, are you directly thinking about Timothy Morton [the philosopher who coined the term in 2013]?

Daniel Lopatin: Absolutely. The idea that if you could envisage the entire history of an object, say a mountain, from being nothing, to being a hill, reaching higher and higher until there’s a different climate at the top, and then eventually being blown away or whatever... if you could envisages the entirety of it, you might say that’s the quality of that object that gives it integrity, and gives it stability or sturdiness in time. It’s not simply just there to be overcome or climbed, or be pretty, or any of these things.

This is exactly what I mean about Silicon Valley. They’re getting rich off a very easy trick, which is telling you, ‘I have the answer’. They’ll tell you that the horse is going to change your life and solve all of your problems. The truth is, things are shifting and transforming in time, forever, and our experience of those things is [shaped by] the values that we have in the moment when we encounter them. For me, as an artist, I’m just trying to illustrate how I interact with the environment and what makes me feel something. Maybe it can be exemplary... ‘I can interact with my environment and feel stuff too.’

Why is the album called Tranquilizer?

Daniel Lopatin: I’m just so tired of this slow, grim slide or gradual chipping away of reality, reality being consumed or subsumed by simulations and concepts and surfaces, for what’s felt like years now... since Covid, but I could really trace it back, paranoically, on some weird Pynchon level, to 9/11. My entire adult life has been a fight against it, and I don’t think I’m different to most people in that way. I think we’re all looking around saying: ‘Where is God?’ Tranquilizer means that I will not be put down by force.

Were you working on Marty Supreme at the same time as making Tranquilizer? Was there any influence between the two projects?

Daniel Lopatin: I was making Tranquilizer with a hard deadline, because I had been talking to Josh about [the film] and when we were going to do it. But yeah, conversations for Marty were going on the whole time, demos were being sketched and stuff like that. And Josh was hearing Tranquilizer... It’s hard, because I don’t want to reveal too much about the film, but I think they both play with time in really interesting ways.

Tranquilizer is released via Warp Records on November 21, 2025. You can preorder it here.