Style: Post-Metal, Progressive Metal (Mixed Vocals)
Recommended for fans of: Mastodon, Cult of Luna, Isis
Country: Germany
Release date: 25 September 2026

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I was lucky to be able to grow up next to the mighty Pacific Ocean, and naturally I have a deep personal connection to it. The Pacific has been a massive part of my life and an even more massive part of the Earth, taking up about a third of the Earth’s surface. But while my connection to The Ocean isn’t as long-lasting or strong as my connection to the ocean, the German prog/post-metal collective and I do go back a handful of years, with Pelagial and the Phanerozoic duology being long-time staples in my rotation. Their last album, 2023’s Holocene, left me underwhelmed, though, and I went into the band’s eleventh album, Solaris, hoping The Ocean had found a rogue wave of inspiration in the last three years—especially given substantial lineup changes, including the loss of the band’s frontman Loïc Rossetti.

Solaris’s main strength is how it sounds: Mixed and mastered by Swedish production guru Jens Bogren, Solaris immediately forwards itself as cinematic in production and scope; the obligatory two minute introductory track, “52°30’11″N, 13°26’12″E,” opens with a vibraphone solo, in which gentle horns and rippling strings slowly fill the negative space between the notes. The extended buildup leading into the first full-length track, “Departure Song,” makes that song’s first crunchy riff hit extra powerfully, with sweeping dynamic contrasts between the band’s proggy and post-y tendencies. Moreover, every performer takes up an appropriate share of the mix. Dual vocalists Enrico Tiberi, an uncannily similar replacement for long-time The Ocean vocalist Rossetti, and Lane Shi (Otay:Onii) are placed front-and-center, except for Shi’s quieter melismatic vocalizations in the final two tracks. The guitars, although their tone is overly clean, have some heft, and the drums are punchy. All told, Bogren is the real star performer for Solaris.

The atmospheric post-metal crunch of the high-tide climaxes sounds like a natural extension of the softer proggy dynamics and Intronaut-esque rhythmic interplay of the low-tide. The end of The Ocean’s massive crescendos swell with as much dynamism as ever, and fans of the Phanerozoic-era of the band will latch onto heavier moments like the chorus in “Light Pollution,” the second half of the career-longest epic “Simulacra,” and the massive bluesy climax of “Ultima Esperanza.” Solaris has sprinkled moments that reflect The Ocean’s years of progressive post-metal excellence. By and large, however, The Ocean have succumbed to what I will dub “Iron Maiden syndrome.” The last few Iron Maiden albums have had the old dogs flash good ideas but buried them in songs that are far too long on bloated albums—The Ocean run ashore into that trend on Solaris. For instance, “Simulacra” is eighteen minutes long, taking forever to get going and featuring the same quantity of ideas as 2018’s shorter “Devonian: Nascent.” Rather than flowing from idea to idea to create a complete song, “Simulacra” bolsters its length by repeating weaker ideas to a degree that waters them down. Earlier on the album, “Departure Song” ends with over two minutes of the same riff—it’s not even a particularly compelling one—and “Light Pollution” drags a verse-chorus structure to the ten minute mark. While no individual sections in the track are bad, it’s simply longer than it needs to be, a microcosm of the album, which at seventy-minutes absolutely dwarfs my favorite The Ocean albums, which all clock in around the fifty-minute mark. The Ocean could literally trim off twenty minutes of fat and repetition on Solaris to make a much sleeker album that emphasizes the best of the songwriting.

While “Simulacra” is obviously bloated with filler riffs and ideas, the final ten minutes of the album—starting in the last minute of “Ultima Esperanza” and encompassing “Milk of My Dreams” and “51°28′30″S, 73°6′11″W”—turn to electronica led by the pulsating synths of Thorsten Quaeschning (Tangerine Dream). This style of synth is a textural focus that hovers in the background throughout Solaris—one of the album’s strongest musical and narrative throughlines, in fact—and I have no inherent problems with a full track of Tangerine Dream-styled electronica on Solaris. “Milk of My Dreams” is a driving, trance-y banger that would work well as a mid-album interlude like “On the Run” from Dark Side of the Moon; it would serve as an acceptable, albeit overly long, coda. But a back-to-back combo of electronica tracks as a finale absolutely disrupts the flow of Solaris. I am puzzled by The Ocean’s choice to include two of virtually the same track to end the album.

The Ocean have always had clunky lyrics, but they’d at least been thought-provoking in their explorations of the environment and the human psyche. The lyricism on Solaris, however, sees The Ocean taking a nosedive, full of sophomoric poetics, cringe-inducing “insights” into the state of the world, and mediocre metaphors/similes. The worst offender by far is lead single, “Light Pollution,” which is so on-the-nose it’s painful, and of course the awful lyrics are repeated several times as a chorus. They’re bad enough to deserve a block quote:

It hasn’t really been so long 
Since our communication has become intercontinental 
With satellite phones and drones 
It hasn’t really been that long 
Since our communication has gone intercontinental 
With cables, phone lines and missiles.
We have been getting so very used 
To the concept of immediacy 
To the point that we have sacrificed 
The last corners of our privacy

It’s a banal, unpoetic explanation of something extremely self-evident, and, moreover, doesn’t feature the type of vocal hooks that make for a good chorus—with words that are neither catchy nor worth repeating. And who the hell uses the term “satellite phone” in the Year of Our Lord 2026? In “Ultima Esperanza,” Tiberi repeatedly chants the mantra “hope is like a frail piece of driftwood,” as if saying the line more would make the simile better—the repetition reveals how frail the lyricism is, much like a piece of driftwood. Moreover, while Tiberi’s singing and shouting are both adequate, the band found someone who sounds too much like Rossetti, making his absence feel more noticeable whenever Tiberi shifts away from being a one-to-one copy. On the other hand, Shi’s vocal style is at complete odds with modern The Ocean’s buttery sound. The twisted tone she uses on Solaris worked excellently integrated into the style of her avant-garde solo project Otay:Onii, but she and The Ocean—with their progressive yet not particularly adventurous sound—come across as a stylistic mismatch.

While the DNA underlying Solaris shares strands with my favorite albums from The Ocean, resurfacing after their absence on Holocene, the new record shows another band succumbing to father time by writing longer songs that simultaneously have fewer ideas: a recipe for a mediocre product. With poor pacing, underwhelming vocals, bad lyricism, and bloated songwriting, Solaris continues The Ocean’s downward plunge. So despite my kinship with the ocean, my relationship with The Ocean, unfortunately, is growing more strained by the album.

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Recommended tracks: Belligerence, Ultima Esperanza
You may also like: Intronaut, Rosetta, Dvne, Hippotraktor, Psychonaut, Final Light
Final verdict: 5/10

Related links: Bandcamp | Facebook | Instagram

Label: Pelagic Records

The Ocean is:
– Enrico Tiberi (Vocals)
– Lane Shi (Vocals)
– Robin Staps (Guitars)
– Emmanuel Jessua (Guitars)
– Marco Gennaro (Guitars)
– Mattias Hägerstrand (Bass)
– Jordi Farré (Drums)
With guests:
– Peter Voigtmann (Keyboards, track 3)
– Jovi Zhang (Vibraphone)
– Thorsten Quaeschning (Keyboards)
– Orestis Zafiriou (Keyboards)
– Simen Eifring (Trombone)