Oneohtrix Point Never - Age Of (Japanese Edition) (2018)

Age Of is OPN’s eigth studio album and the latest chapter of a definitive American hauntological saga for this transitory, phase-shifting decade. It features Anohni, James Blake, Prurient, Kelsey Lu, and others in various capacities...

Strewn across its prog-R&B vape chamber fantasias, vocals often take precendence in a mix of auto-tuned Future-style soul, sadboy elegies, black metal croaks and warped stadium pop choruses, all in duet with his signature synthetic chorales. The nature of film editing and writing music to imagery - as with last year’s Good Time OST - also seems to exert an increasing hold over his music, as the variation from scene-to-scene and range of voices in Age Of feels like an ensemble cast, when it’s patently all the work of a singular, restless composer

In key with his (not hard to pronounce) moniker - it’s One Oh Trix Point Never, a play on the radio station Magic 106.7 - Lopatin’s music feels ever more like dialling into a chimeric, algorithmic radio station where anachronistic MOR and adult contemporary modulates with modern R&B, trap soul and Afrobeats in a very contemporary sort of hyperjazz-fusion that absorbs and transmutes emotional signals from electromagnetic ether - perhaps imagining Paddy McAloon alchemising with Future, James Ferraro mutually dreaming with Laurie Anderson, or Thomas Dolby jamming the airwaves with The Game.

From early listens, we got snagged on the likes of his xanny-smushed new age soul number Black Snow, as well as the cinematic intrigue of richly visual imagery of Warning, and the salty slant of We’ll Take It, which uncannily sounds a bit like Croww’s Slipknot deconstructions, while the ohrwurming pop harmonies of Same will instantly lay eggs in your lugs, and Last Known Image of a Song beautifully sounds like 4Hero gone ambient.