Tranquilizer isn’t the sound of sedation but resurfacing. Lopatin isn’t condemning our need for escape but, rather, exploring what happens after. The record maps a movement from weightless calm into something more grounded — not a hero’s journey, but the necessary cycle of withdrawal and return that keeps us sane in a world both overwhelming and mundane. We plummet from the watery bliss of “Lifeworld” into the mournful melancholy of “Cherry Blue” and spastic grooves of “Rodl Glide.”

As always with OPN, the real collides with the unreal. Listen closely and you will hear the scrape of fingers on a fretboard, a stone sliding across a dungeon floor, the squeak of a door opening. His music has never been an abstract color field; it has weight, edges, shadows.

If R Plus Seven was all crystalline arpeggiators and Garden of Delete was a feverish upchuck of gurgling synths, Tranquilizer feels like falling out of a dream you can still touch.