Two men stand beside a swing and discuss the morality of progress. If humans decide what makes science moral or immoral, what are we to make of Hiroshima? The exchange comes early in Andrei Tarkovsky’s 1972 film Solaris and echoes throughout The Ocean’s new album of the same name. There’s a specific kind of irony in one of metal’s proggiest bands making a record suspicious of progress itself.
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Like the film, the album Solaris interrogates human ambition on an interplanetary scale, but Germany’s The Ocean links that to the drive behind the European “age of exploration.” When does curiosity become projection, and exploration become domination? Does the ability to take the next step justify taking it?
This isn’t the first time bandleader Robin Staps has looked to the Soviet filmmaker for inspiration. 2013’s Pelagial was tethered to Stalker as it sank through the ever-dimming layers of the sea. Solaris replaces that vertical progression with a pursuit of the horizon. Instead of an inexorable plunge into dark, crushing depths, the new material expands outward, encounters its own sunlit reflection and returns.
The Ocean composed Solaris’ instrumental foundations in 2021 to follow Phanerozoic II, with the concept and lyrics coming later. In the interim, the band underwent a Ship of Theseus moment. Only Staps and longtime bassist Mattias Hägerstrand remained from the studio lineup of 2023’s atmospheric trilogy-closer Holocene. Now a seven-piece, with a total of three guitarists and two new co-vocalists, The Ocean has a renewed collective energy. However rebuilt and augmented, the material still feels unmistakably like The Ocean, a testament to Staps’ songwriting and strong eye for international collaborators. Grimace-inducing, midpaced grooves throughout the record show The Ocean haven’t forgotten their Precambrian roots while more balanced electronic elements and the two distinct new vocalists elevate it.
Italian Enrico Tiberi and Lane Shi, who performs solo as Otay:onii and formerly fronted Boston’s Elizabeth Colour Wheel, complement and conflict like blocks of different materials that happen to fit perfectly. Tiberi’s register recalls former vocalist Loïc Rossetti, but the wider range of his screams and growls gives him his own identity on Solaris. Shi’s distinct caterwauls and glissanding melodies give the record technical and emotional depths previously unexplored by The Ocean. She never becomes a novelty or feels relegated to guest vocalist status. Her improvised, one-take wordless exhortation at the end of “Light Pollution” and vitriolic film-quoting verse in standout banger “Belligerence” showcase her extreme range.
Across Solaris, Staps read the accounts of expeditions led by the likes of Vasco da Gama and Magellan, rooting the futuristic story in the earth. The album even opens with the latitude and longitude of the band’s space in Berlin. Those explorers’ ambitions mirrored a familiar artistic drive in Staps.
“I saw a lot of parallels between these historic explorers and modern artists,” he says. Questions about what force is behind this drive led him back to curiosity. “In English, that is a rather innocent term,” Staps says. “The German word for it is Neugier, and Gier is greed. So it’s like a greed for something new.”
This is mirrored in Staps’ push to play shows outside of the traditional touring circuit: playing squats in Siberia and Chinese livehouses and witnessing folks there interacting with his art in different ways than he was used to. Exploration breeding connection, but not without projection.
“We’re not looking for new worlds; we’re looking for mirrors of the existing worlds, of the things that we already know,” he says, invoking the film and his album.
“Simulacra,” Solaris’ sprawling middle movement, looks this mirror dead in the eye. From Shi’s elegant opening, the 17-minute epic gathers potential energy like a storm and unleashes it with The Ocean’s trademark undulating rhythms. Its tidal push and pull occupies an unpredictable space between complex crush and deft caress. It ends in a haunting duet and acoustic guitar, its vital energy spent.
For Staps, the film’s simulacra point toward a modern, terrestrial quandary. “A lot of our mediated experience these days through news and social media and all of that is dealing with simulacra, essentially with appearances that maybe don’t have a counterpart in reality,” he says.
The Ocean remains the only band that can get postmodern philosophy stuck in your head. Hooks that interrogate colonial ambition and meaning in the age of instant intercontinental communication. Lyrics seemingly alternating between addressing the living ocean on Solaris and the listener. They make you think deeply, but also what you should have said to an ex, before drawing you down endless research rabbit holes about dead white Europeans.
“Light Pollution” mourns our private lives. Beneath its uneven waves lies a concern with what expanding communication networks actually allow us to communicate, and what their constant glare takes away. “If there are no dark corners anymore, then we lose our privacy, and we lose our secret spaces, which are so important,” Staps says.
After diving into the deep end of electronic composition on Holocene, the band has dialed it back on Solaris. That restraint gives the electronic passages a bigger splash, a musical counterpart to the record’s questions about progress. These appear on “Ultima Esperanza,” which makes the pursuit of the horizon sound perilous. The song opens with a Cult of Luna-esque shuffle. Shi’s vocals float over swelling Rhodes piano and Hammond organ like fog at the edge of a map, with Part II offering the record’s most haunting and accusatory duet. The track reads like the diary of a man floating in the ocean at the end of the world, musing on the hope of driftwood as he loses his mind. Tangerine Dream’s Thorsten Quaeschning joins the subsequent “Milk of My Dreams,” unexpectedly taking the Solaris expedition to a club at the end of the world.
“I don’t think there’s anything wrong with curiosity per se,” Staps says, closing the thematic ouroboros. “But it’s important to be aware of some of the implications that come with it.” Staps and the listener are left with more questions and fewer answers by the end of Solaris. The only certainty is the dawn of The Ocean’s glorious new epoch.
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Solaris is available now via Pelagic Records.
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