The Ocean announce new album ‘Holocene’

THE OCEAN have announced a new album!

Titled Holocene, the upcoming album from the German post-metal band is the follow-up to 2020’s Phanerozoic II: Mesozoic | Cenozoic, and is scheduled to be released in May this year, via Pelagic Records. The news of the upcoming album comes on the back of January’s single, Preboreal, which will appear on the upcoming new album.

Speaking about the writing process for their new album, guitarist Robin Staps says, “the writing process of every album we’ve ever made started with me coming up with a guitar riff, a drumbeat or a vocal idea. This album is different since every single song is based on a musical idea that was originally written by Peter [Voigtmann, synths]. He came up with these amazing synth parts that were already sounding huge in pre-production, and he sent me some of those raw, unfinished ideas during mid lockdown 2020… and while it was all electronic, it had that definite THE OCEAN vibe to it. It made me want to pick up my guitar instantly… and so I did, and it didn’t take long until we had an inspiring creative exchange that was heading towards totally unforeseen but very exciting places.”

The album was recorded entirely by the band themselves at Voigtmann‘s studio Die Mühle in the rural North of Germany and at the band’s own Oceanland 2.0 studio in Berlin. “While we still think that Jens Bogren‘s mixes of our previous three albums sound great, we wanted a more organic sound this time around,” says Staps. “So we set out on a mission to get test mixes done by a number of people, from close friends to some pretty big names, but none of them came close to how we wanted this record to sound, and after a few months we got really frustrated.” The band then turned to Karl Daniel Lidén who mixed and mastered the album.

“Holocene is an appendix to the two Phanerozoic albums and Precambrian, or the final and concluding chapter, making it a quadrilogy if you want so,” Staps comments. “It’s tackling the Holocene epoch, which is the current and shortest chapter in earth’s history, but it is essentially an album about the angst, alienation, loss of reason and critical thinking, rise of conspiracy theories and deconstruction of values in the modern age.”

Whilst the track list is yet to be revealed, you can view the artwork for the upcoming new album below:

Holocene is set for release on May 19th via Pelagic Records. Pre-orders will be available soon.

For more information on THE OCEAN like their official page on Facebook.