Revisiting the best pop song of 2020 (that you probably never heard)

A year later, Oneohtrix Point Never’s “No Nightmares” remains triumphant

A year ago this month, Oneohtrix Point Never (one of many pseudonyms for experimental pop auteur Daniel Lopatin) released Magic Oneohtrix Point Never, a loving ode to the indelible, comforting allure of bygone FM radio.

Think of the station you listened to growing up — the DJs, the earworms they spun like clockwork, the cross-broadcast fuzz, the stratum of ads and white noise — and then dip those memories into a psychedelic coat of nostalgia, longing, and self-reflection, and you have Magic Oneohtrix Point Never.

The whole album is worth a deep dive, but its highlight is undoubtedly “No Nightmares.” The track is so un-apologetically pop, so unabashedly throwback, that whatever irony Lopatin once mined in his music has been obliterated here by pure, wide-eyed (and somewhat mournful) sentimentality. With streaks of Berlin’s “Take My Breath Away” echoing in the stuttering percussion and the Weeknd lending a stack of chromatic vocals to the chorus, “No Nightmares” is the best pop song of 2020.

Part of that is because it’s as 2020 as 2020 gets. While the track could be plopped into a John Hughes film without any sort of anachronistic hiccup, it’s also a despondent gut-check. Hearing Lopatin sing “I’ve been missin’ from my own dream/It’s what happens so close,” it’s difficult not to imagine him sitting on his couch, looking at a blurry, starless-sky through his window, and wondering what the world (and our loved ones) were doing while we all self-isolated.

Lopatin has always had that sort of talent, from way back on Chuck Person’s Eccojams Vol. 1: conjuring very specific feelings from very tiny moments, whether it’s with samples of Fleetwood Mac, scoring acclaimed films, or collaborating with the world’s biggest pop stars. If anything, the soaring, synth-drenched retrograde of “No Nightmares” proves that Lopatin should be a pop star in his own right.