Release and artwork
In October 2025, Lopatin announced the upcoming release of Tranquilizer on November 17 digitally, and for physical issues on November 21, through Warp Records. [7] The album was later released on November 21. [8] New music from him would be released weekly after the announcement. [9] On October 20, the first three tracks, "For Residue", "Bumpy", and "Lifeworld", were released. On Spotify, the tracks were released as an extended play (EP) named tra. Alongside, a music video for "Lifeworld" was posted. [9] It was directed by Lopatin. [‡ 1] On October 27, "Measuring Ruins" was released, with a music video of it directed by Yoshi Sodeoka. [10] "Cherry Blue", the eighth track, and its music video was released on November 3. The music video was directed by Pol Taburet, and – according to Pitchfork – depicts surrealism to show "the gaps between life and death, body and spirit, and decay and renewal". [11] The tenth track, "D.I.S.", and its music video was released on November 10. The music video was directed by Elliott Elder, and its imagery was credited to Julien Gobled. [‡ 2] "Rodl Glide", the fourteenth track, was released on November 17. [‡ 3] The music video for it was released later on the album's release, and was directed by Cory Arcangel. [12] Lopatin toured throughout Europe from November 7 to 13, in support of Tranquilizer. [5]
The cover art of Tranquilizer is a piece entitled Blue Interval, painted in 1972 by Abner Hershberger. [‡ 4] When asked why Lopatin used it for the cover, he said: "I really liked the symmetry of the blades, as if to suggest distinct metronomic time. And then the chaos of what I think of as lime-green grass – or the tilling of the field – underneath it." [‡ 5]
Reception
According to the review aggregator Metacritic , Tranquilizer received "universal acclaim" based on a weighted average score of 81 out of 100 from 7 critic scores. [14] Pitchfork named the album as "Best New Music" on review; reviewer Philip Sherburne wrote that it was "the most immediately pleasurable Oneohtrix Point Never album in some time". [20] Alexis Petridis, writer for The Guardian , said that "Tranquilizer seems unlikely to help you calm down. It's too kaleidoscopic and restless, too crammed with sounds: an album that demands – and repays – your full attention, rather than simply drifting by." [16] The Quietus author Liam Inscoe-Jones compared the album to Lopatin's album Replica , in which Tranquilizer was said to "[read] like a celebration, a love letter to art which was once vanished and soon, most likely, will be again", while Replica was "located sadness in the motifs of advertising". [21] In a writeup for The Wire , the reviewer wrote that the album "seems governed by the temporal logic of its samples, as if Lopatin were intent on preserving their integrity rather than reshaping them. The emotional resonance that usually grounds Lopatin's work feels somewhat displaced by this formal precision." [22]
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