The music of Oneohtrix Point Never has always been speculative. Speculative in the sense that each of his albums operates like a space-and-time-bending fiction. This is music as fable, quest, or utopia.

Daniel Lopatin is often known as Oneohtrix Point Never, but has gone by a few other names in the past. His is a sublime art propelled by a nuclear-strength imagination, which results in music that feels like a Hieronymus Bosch painting, with irreal and riddling images, elaborate metaphors, shifting perspectives and polyphonic textures. Lopatin has the uncanny ability to make a system of buckwild mythology feel thrillingly alien and coherent simultaneously. Take, for example, his 2015 release, Garden of Delete, which had a fan-site for a non-existent band, a fake interview with a teenaged alien named Ezra, and a miasma of videos, blogs, and Twitter accounts that plunged 20,000 feet down the uncanny valley.

Actually, each version of OPN has routinely felt like an intergalactically exotic experience. He was Chuck Person in the late aughts, chopping-and-screwing pop’s plasticity into numinous masterworks he called Eccojams (which incidentally blueprinted the genre of vaporwave.) Before that, he was a kid at Pratt, mused by his Greater-Boston-by-way-of-Russian-Jewish-emigré childhood, making cassettes that somehow harmoniously blended noise music and New Age of the ilk of Pure Moods. He mutated into Oneohtrix Point Never in 2007, shifting something tectonic in the zeitgeist with 2011’s Replica, before signing to Warp to release R Plus Seven, the aforementioned Garden of Delete, Age Of and 2020’s freakout-in-4D, MagicOneohtrix Point Never.

Art installations and salutary performance stints followed (unimaginably – or maybe very imaginably – he toured with Nine Inch Nails and Soundgarden in 2014), and he became noted for his collaborations. Pairings and partnerships read like a litany of the most fascinating artists this side (or that side) of the ‘10s: ANHONI, James Blake, David Byrne, Ryuichi Sakamoto, Tim Hecker, Eli Keszler, Weyes Blood, Kelsey Lu, Arca. He was musical director for the halftime show at Superbowl LV, co-produced The Weeknd’s latest album Dawn FM; scored films by Sofia Coppola (The Bling Ring, 2013), the Safdie Brothers in Good Time (2017), and, famously, the soundtrack to the Adam Sandler-fronted Uncut Gems (2019) – an OST that summoned one of the most intensely compulsive moods ever committed to screen. He seems to forecast the future – or what will be future-thinking – with scary reliability.

Again is his tenth studio album. It is, as Lopatin says, part of “a speculative autobiography,” or a continued idea: a sort of sequel to Garden of Delete’s expansive, layer-cake lore, though shorn of conceptual weight. It’s a vision of OPN, raw and uncut.