Daniel Lopatin, better known as the musician and film composer Oneohtrix Point Never<\/a>, used to make music for advertisements. \u201cThe consulting firm that hired me was always like, \u2018You\u2019re the man, do whatever.\u2019 I\u2019d be like, \u2018Okay, cool.\u2019 They\u2019d ask me to be myself. And then the brand would go, \u2018What is this? This is insane,\u2019\u201d he says, comparing the unconventional jingles he created to the surrealist short films David Lynch<\/a> made for luxury fragrances and midsize sedans between movies. \u201cThey\u2019d ask me for a revision, and I\u2019d be pissed and dejected and make joke music \u2014 music for clown cars. Then I\u2019d never hear from them again. That\u2019s usually how it went.\u201d<\/p>\n Since his debut album, 2007\u2019s Betrayed in the Octagon,<\/em> which reimagined the supposedly cheesy synthesizer sounds of 1980s New Age into an enveloping soundtrack for dread and ennui, the 43-year-old\u2019s uncompromising approach has attracted some of the most influential ears in Hollywood. He has become a creative docent for artists seeking an injection of his outr\u00e9 sensibilities, including Charli XCX, ANOHNI, Soccer Mommy, and pop megastar the Weeknd.<\/p>\n But it\u2019s his film scores that have put him in the awards conversation. A fan of Lopatin\u2019s early ambient releases, Josh Safdie contacted him while working out the sonic and emotional landscape of his 2017 neon-noir movie, Good Time<\/em><\/a>,<\/em> which he co-directed with his brother, Benny. Lopatin\u2019s score modulated between tension and unbearable anxiety until its poignant (Iggy Pop\u2013assisted) catharsis. He worked again with the Safdies on 2019\u2019s Uncut Gems<\/em><\/a>,<\/em> adding a contented, meditative spaciness to match the Pollyannaish dreams of the film\u2019s protagonist, played by Adam Sandler. And now, for Josh\u2019s \u201950s-set Marty Supreme<\/em><\/a>,<\/em> Lopatin has composed a score full of sounds from the \u201980s and beyond. Like Trent Reznor and Mica Levi, he has transported compositional styles more common at basement noise shows to big-screen success. His music is made for headphones; it\u2019s simultaneously optimistic and alienated, like so much of virtual life. Through his ability to undergird a scene with these kinds of complex feelings, he has begun his ascent into an elite echelon of star composers. He can \u201cmake the music weave into the picture to become one complete, immersive, living thing,\u201d says Sofia Coppola\u2019s music supervisor, Brian Reitzell.<\/p>\n In person, Lopatin is disarmingly sweet. When he talks, his hands never stop moving, whether to demonstrate a keyboard part or to gesture toward a heady, philosophical idea. We meet at a dumpling spot inside a semi-abandoned mall in Chinatown, where he has joined me from his home in Williamsburg. Mid-meal, a fan who had been eating nearby stops at our table to acknowledge Lopatin\u2019s influence on his own development as an electronic musician. Lopatin seems genuinely interested in the guy\u2019s music and his opinion of the food. This kind of thing tends to happen: Years ago, Timoth\u00e9e Chalamet came up and introduced himself at a party. \u201cHe\u2019s like, \u2018OPN, what do you know about guitar? I can\u2019t really talk about it, but I gotta learn guitar. Can you help me out?\u2019\u201d Lopatin recalls. \u201cI was like, \u2018Not really.\u2019\u201d Chalamet, unable to suppress his excitement, whispered, \u201cI\u2019m playing Bob<\/a>!\u201d<\/p>\n Lopatin comes from a musical family. His mother was a conservatory-trained pianist and musicologist, and his father, an engineer, improvised on synths in a psych-rock cover band. They emigrated to Massachusetts from the USSR in 1982 and worked in tech. \u201cI am the exact product of my circumstances,\u201d says Lopatin. While living in Boston, bored with his textbook-publishing job, he started recording as Oneohtrix Point Never, a jokey reference to the local soft-rock station he grew up listening to. In 2009, he began making \u201ceccojams\u201d by overlaying snippets of schlocky, mall-friendly radio fare from his childhood on compilations of footage ripped from YouTube and ancient VHS tapes, turning them into experimental film scores of glitchy, uncanny longing. He moved to New York to attend Pratt\u2019s library-sciences grad program and escape the aggro masculinity of New England\u2019s experimental-music scene.<\/p>\n In 2011, Reitzell heard Lopatin\u2019s haunting television samples on his album Replica <\/em>and emailed him. \u201cBrian was like, \u2018Hey, I think you should really consider getting involved in scoring. Do you want to come out to L.A. and shadow me?\u2019\u201d Lopatin says. How could he say \u201cno\u201d? As a child, he had wanted to become a filmmaker, going as far as to apply to NYU\u2019s film program (he didn\u2019t get in), and had long thought about his own music as if it were a soundtrack for a nonexistent movie. \u201cWhatever Brian was working on, I was working on,\u201d Lopatin says. That soon included The Bling Ring<\/em>\u2019s many needle drops, which Lopatin\u2019s compositions spritzed the edges of. Reitzell told him, \u201cSofia says your music sounds like perfume.\u201d<\/p>\n \n Timoth\u00e9e Chalamet in Marty Supreme.<\/em> In 2013, Lopatin signed to the storied electronic label Warp Records. His first album for it, 2013\u2019s R<\/em> Plus Seven, <\/em>sounded like a joyous roller coaster of MIDI instrumentation. Subsequent releases have incorporated harpsichord and touched on n\u00fc metal and the \u201cdead air\u201d of radio format changes. Brands and TV shows wanted his music (or so they thought), and his work started appearing in major art institutions such as MoMA, Tate Britain, and the Hammer Museum. Lopatin began to grow wary of the compromises he was being asked to make for commercial work. In 2015, Josh Safdie reached out after returning to Lopatin\u2019s 2007 song \u201cBehind the Bank,\u201d which he first heard on a mix CD while working at a video store in Little Italy. He sent over a mood board for Good Time <\/em>featuring a picture of SpongeBob and, in Lopatin\u2019s words, \u201cweird heist imagery.\u201d \u201cThis is exactly the contrast that I\u2019m into,\u201d Lopatin said at the time.<\/em> \u201cI was really impressed. They were definitely speaking my language.\u201d Soon, he and Safdie were pirating plug-ins for weird sounds and discussing how synths can function in a film score.<\/p>\n While Good Time<\/em> and Uncut Gems<\/em> are set near the present day and their scores roughly reflect those time periods, Marty Supreme<\/em> is about the past. The titular character, played by Chalamet, is a scrappy kid trying to claw his way out of the shtetl of the Lower East Side through his Ping-Pong prowess and charismatic hucksterism. The original script Lopatin read included cues for anachronistic songs. \u201cMarty is envisaging a version of himself that is totally out of step with everyone else,\u201d Lopatin says. \u201cHe has to create this self-image of the man he wants to be. And that is represented by the music of a time that has yet to happen.\u201d (As Lopatin\u2019s music usually incorporates synthetic textures, it\u2019s hard to imagine him making authentic \u201950s-style compositions.)<\/p>\n Lopatin and Safdie spent around four months in the summer and fall of 2025 working on the score in a cramped midtown studio. Safdie asked him to include intricate, quasi-Baroque arpeggios. \u201cI\u2019m sending him the Brandenburg Concertos<\/a>,\u201d Lopatin says. \u201c\u2009\u2018Is this what you\u2019re looking for?\u2019 He\u2019s like, \u2018Not quite.\u2019\u201d The music for a sex scene in Central Park begins with a buoyant minimalist melody and then erupts into a power-ballad guitar solo. Other moments evoke the epic mall music of the Trans-Siberian Orchestra. The combination of those Baroque sounds with \u201980s hits like Tears for Fears\u2019 \u201cEverybody Wants to Rule the World\u201d and a fantastic choral arrangement of Alphaville\u2019s \u201cForever Young\u201d adds to the film\u2019s temporal unconventionality. The score is currently on the Oscars shortlist.<\/p>\n Lopatin\u2019s work with the Safdies connected him with Abel Tesfaye, who records as the Weeknd; they first worked together on music for Uncut Gems<\/em> that ultimately didn\u2019t make the soundtrack. They\u2019ve since collaborated on multiple albums, a Super Bowl halftime show, and a full-length movie. \u201cI\u2019m just so smitten with him as a vocalist that it\u2019s hard to work. He has the voice of a cherub. And I\u2019m like, Okay, lock in \u2014 this is work. I need to finish this piece of music,<\/em>\u201d Lopatin says. He scored the Weeknd-starring Hurry Up Tomorrow<\/em><\/a> \u2014 essentially a feature-length music video about how hard it is to be a pop star. The film, which accompanied the Weeknd\u2019s final album under that moniker, was widely panned. The New York Times<\/em> called<\/a> it a \u201chollow core\u201d of a movie; Pitchfork saw<\/a> it as \u201ccaught in the strangulating grasp\u201d of Tesfaye\u2019s \u201cself-made mythology.\u201d Lopatin gets briefly defensive when asked about it. \u201cHurry Up Tomorrow<\/em> is way more interesting than people want to give it credit for. I love the film as a rock opera. I think Abel was being retroactively maligned for The Idol,<\/em>\u201d he says, referring to the heavily criticized HBO series also about the travails of pop stardom. \u201cI think sometimes critics parrot each other more than reach their own conclusions.\u201d<\/p>\n His sympathy isn\u2019t reserved for entertainment royalty. A few days before we spoke, he\u2019d been viscerally upset by the cruelty of an Instagram Reel he\u2019d seen of someone using an AI video to confuse and frighten an older person. \u201cI don\u2019t think the world is necessarily going to fall into pieces, but it\u2019s a lack of consensus reality that is painful and exhausting,\u201d he says. \u201cHumanity is just out of reach now. It\u2019s right there on the shoreline, and we\u2019re drifting away really slowly.\u201d<\/p>\n He\u2019s not opposed to AI on principle. For his 2023 album, Again,<\/em> Lopatin incorporated music generated or altered by AI software, including OpenAI\u2019s Jukebox. \u201cIt was this really sweet-spot moment for AI because it was so bad. As it\u2019s gotten better, it\u2019s just become more standardized and mid,\u201d he says. He thinks the tech industry is mostly selling snake oil, but he won\u2019t rule out AI as a potential tool for artistic experimentation. \u201cYou can\u2019t reject ugly things just for being ugly,\u201d he says. Otherwise, \u201cyou\u2019re just closing your eyes to what is all around you.\u201d Still, he avoided AI while making his most recent album, November\u2019s acclaimed Tranquilizer<\/em><\/a>,<\/em> and composing Marty Supreme<\/em>\u2019s score.<\/p>\n Lopatin has often described his artistic ethos as \u201ccompressionism<\/a>,\u201d an attempt to embrace and distill the chaos and grotesquerie of contemporary life. \u201cIt\u2019s asking, \u2018Do you want to be in control of your destiny and enjoy your reality as everything\u2019s fragmenting around you?\u2019\u201d he says. (Incidentally, this is the central struggle of Marty Supreme.<\/em>) \u201c\u2018Or do you just want to be subdued and imprisoned by it?\u2019\u201d<\/p>\n![](\"https:\/\/pyxis.nymag.com\/v1\/imgs\/25e\/c23\/34a3cb365742608c501e804e5a20d7f89a-Oneohtrix-secondary.rhorizontal.w700.jpg\")
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