After noise-rap upstarts/notable flakes Death Grips disbanded again without warning last summer—leaving Nine Inch Nails without an opening act for its North American arena tour with Soundgarden—Trent Reznor made the surprise call to Daniel Lopatin of Oneohtrix Point Never to replace the group on a leg of said tour. In lieu of playing selections from his decidedly subdued catalog to crowds of aloof grunge dads for two weeks, he wrote a new live set of what he dubbed “customized hard rock cyberdrone” for the occasion.
Those performances played heavily into the composition of his new record, Garden Of Delete, and comprise the bulk of its content. All brutalist synth tones and disembodied cyborg choirs—the completely indiscernible chorus to “Animals” is a legitimate earworm—it’s a truly remarkable record that’s light-years ahead of Lopatin’s previous body of work, and easily among the strangest records of this, or any, year.
—Möhammad Choudhery
