What happened to The Ocean between 2022 and 2025 would have finished most bands. The lineup that made ‘Phanerozoic I’, ‘Phanerozoic II’, and ‘Holocene’ dissolved almost entirely, leaving founding guitarist, songwriter, and lyricist Robin Staps, longtime bassist Mattias Hagerstrand, and incoming drummer Jordi Farre (also of Crippled Black Phoenix) to decide what comes next. They decided to go bigger.
The result is ‘Solaris’, the 12th studio album from The Ocean, arriving September 25th. A near-70-minute record built around late Soviet filmmaker Andrei Tarkovsky’s film of the same name, it’s the most conceptually and musically ambitious thing the band has put their name on across 25 years of existence.
The first single, “Light Pollution,” sets the tone immediately. It opens with synth textures that connect directly to ‘Holocene’ before building momentum and pivoting somewhere new entirely. The finale is orchestral, slow-burning, and genuinely crushing, a towering convergence of grandeur and heaviness that announces the new era without hedging.
The song’s themes run deep. Staps frames it around orbital motion, the idea that technology and communication have advanced without actually moving humanity forward. “We’ve witnessed several communication revolutions throughout the 20th and 21st centuries, but have we actually become any better at communicating?” he asks. “Has there really been forward movement, or has the motion been orbital, have we merely been treading water?”
The music video brings in filmmaker Craig Murray, known for his work with Mogwai and Converge, to introduce new vocalists Enrico Tiberi and Lane Shi (Elizabeth Colour Wheel, Otay:Onii). Murray’s approach is meticulous. Staps describes him as “a one-man army” who hand-sketches every scene before shooting and is still up at 2am glueing tentacles or smearing slime and sand at the end of a 20-hour day. The results are cinematic and fully earned.
The expanded lineup for ‘Solaris’ brings in Emmanuel Jessua of Hypno5e and Marco Gennaro on guitar, while Thorsten Quaeschning of Tangerine Dream contributes modular synthesizers. Jens Bogren, who mixed ‘Pelagial’ and both ‘Phanerozoic’ records, returns for mixing and mastering duties.
“Light Pollution” arrives as one of the most fully realized singles The Ocean have released, a statement track from a band that refused the easy exit and came back with something that demands to be heard. ‘Solaris’ lands September 25th.