Oneohtrix Point Never

Magic Oneohtrix Point Never is the ninth studio album by Oneohtrix Point Never, and its title points directly back to where Daniel Lopatin began: Magic 106.7, the Boston soft‑rock station whose name he misheard as “Magic Oneohtrix Point Never” when he was a teenager. That mondegreen became his alias, first used on early releases like Betrayed in the Octagon, and here he folds it into a concept: an album meant to simulate the experience of listening to FM radio for an entire day. The record is steeped in a “psychedelic radio aesthetic,” its structure and textures inspired by revisiting old radio mixtapes Lopatin made as a kid just outside Boston.

To capture that feeling, Magic OPN leans into eclecticism. Alongside collages of hallucinogenic DJ chatter and format flips, there are mutant pop ballads (like “No Nightmares,” featuring friend and co‑executive producer The Weeknd), warped alt‑rock anthems (“I Don’t Love Me Anymore”), new‑age satires (“The Whether Channel”), and sculptures wrought from sound most people would dismiss as garbage or background noise. Lopatin gathered snippets of broadcast ephemera - station IDs, call‑ins, traffic reports, generic jingles - from online archives and manipulated them into a kind of cartoonish Greek chorus, threading brief “Cross Talk” interludes between more fully developed tracks. These fragments handily stitch together what one reviewer calls his “most divergent and disjointed” album to date, turning fragmentation into narrative.