Oneohtrix Point Never – Replica

Replica, released on November 8, 2011, is the fifth studio album by Oneohtrix Point Never (Daniel Lopatin), and his first album recorded in a proper studio environment. The record marks a pivot in his aesthetic—shifting from synth-based minimalism toward a densely layered, sample-driven approach. Lopatin builds the album almost entirely from fragments of television advertisements (“1980s and 1990s TV commercials”), manipulating found audio into circular loops, textures, and abstract soundscapes. Replica feels like a fractured soundtrack to a media-saturated present: echoes, stutters, and spectral voices loom amid drifting harmonies and distortion. Structurally, Replica plays like a suite of micro-episodes. Tracks like “Sleep Dealer,” “Nassau,” and the title piece spin from skeletal ideas into richer emotional environments, balancing repetition with rupture. Lopatin’s restraint invites listeners into active engagement—small shifts in tone, the bleed of one sample into another, and silence become part of the narrative. Over time, Replica has been acclaimed as a pivotal moment in Lopatin’s career and in experimental electronic music more broadly, influencing how found sound and ambient abstraction can inhabit the pop periphery.

Reviews

“Replica, which also happens to be Lopatin’s best work to date by far, is coming from somewhere else.” – Pitchfork

“Even at his most horizontal … the loops mean he’s always trading in rhythm, … ‘Sleep Dealer’ and ‘Nassau’ snap and skip like warped lock-grooves.” – Resident Advisor

“Replica develops a tone somewhere between the melancholy of impending meltdown … and the enchantment of infinite space.” – Treble