Tranquilizer opens with wind. Then chimes. A 12-string guitar. A pitched-down voice announcing, enigmatically, “For residue.” It’s a toast, you suspect, to the things we preserve and the things we lose, and from there Daniel Lopatin proceeds to build one of the densest, most beautifully disorienting albums in his catalog.

Which is saying something. Lopatin has spent most of his career as Oneohtrix Point Never making music that resists easy categorization, toggling between hyperactive collage, ambient languor, and something that sounds like the future trying to remember the past. Tranquilizer sits comfortably in that tradition while feeling like a refinement: looser in structure than some of his more conceptual work, but no less rewarding.

The album is relentless in its variety. “Lifeworld” scatters percussion like infinite monkeys clacking away at infinite typewriters before bursting into something beatific and swirling, a moment that calls to mind the Avalanches at their most euphoric. “Fear of Symmetry” carries a Jon Hassell energy, a Weather Channel funk that somehow coheres. “Cherry Blue” hits like a Cocteau Twins homage, all limpid pianos and oceanic drift. “Measuring Ruins” builds out a science-fiction synth-scape that would be at home in any number of imaginary film soundtracks. None of this feels arbitrary. Even at its most unpredictable, the music carries you forward.

What Lopatin achieves on Tranquilizer is the difficult thing: music that’s too active to be ambient, too erratic to be conventional song form, but catchier than most of what gets filed under “experimental.” The abundance can feel staggering. There are more elements in play at any given moment than you could easily tally, and they are constantly shifting. But the album rarely feels difficult or daunting or ostentatiously clever. It just flows.

The conceptual underpinning involves the fragility of cultural memory, the idea that the artifacts and objects that constitute our identities could vanish without warning. Lopatin approaches this with more wistfulness than despair. “Modern Lust” cradles a snippet of muted jazz trumpet like precious cargo. “D.I.S.” enters a state of elastic ambient trance that feels almost meditative in its patience.

Tranquilizer is the work of someone who has spent enough time in his own creative universe to push its edges from the inside. Lopatin knows exactly what OPN sounds like at this point, and he’s using that knowledge not to repeat himself but to find new rooms in a house he built. A strong record, and one of the more compelling things to come out of the experimental electronic space in recent memory.