Some albums arrive according to a carefully mapped plan. Others sit unfinished for years, waiting for the world around them to catch up.
For Robin Staps, Solaris became something even more important. It became the unfinished story that convinced him The Ocean still had a future.
The Berlin atmospheric post metal visionaries will release their twelfth studio album, Solaris, on September 25 through Pelagic Records. It picks up from the final warning on 2023’s Holocene, where “Subatlantic” left humanity preparing to abandon an increasingly uninhabitable Earth.
Yet the music that became Solaris existed long before its story of cosmic escape, historical exploration and humanity’s capacity for self destruction had taken shape.
When I caught up with Robin for Crannk, he took me inside the record’s long journey, the end of The Ocean’s previous lineup, the return to a true collective and the extraordinary dual vocal relationship between Lane Shi and Enrico Tiberi.
The Album That Refused to Remain in the Drawer
Robin began writing the instrumental foundations of Solaris around 2021, during the middle of the pandemic. At that point, there was no voyage toward an intelligent ocean and no narrative connecting explorers, political leaders and artists.
Like most Ocean records, the music began with guitar riffs and programmed drums.
Robin told me he cannot properly compose without drums. Guitar and rhythm develop together, forming the backbone before lyrics, vocals and a wider concept enter the picture.
At roughly the same time, then keyboardist Peter Voigtmann was sending Robin electronic ideas. Building Ocean songs around somebody else’s synthesizer compositions presented a completely different way of working, and those experiments eventually became Holocene.
The heavier material was placed aside while the band completed Holocene and committed to an extensive touring cycle. What would become Solaris remained untouched for several years, growing older while the band travelled the world.
When the established lineup began breaking apart in 2024, Robin considered whether it might be time to let The Ocean rest. The musicians no longer shared the same answer to the question of whether they wanted to continue dedicating their lives to the band.
There was no dramatic betrayal and no bitterness. Lives had changed, children had been born and priorities had shifted. Remaining in a group with The Ocean’s touring demands requires complete commitment, and Robin understood why some members could no longer give that answer without hesitation.
But the unfinished music was still waiting.
“I wasn’t done with the story yet,” Robin told me. “I had this record and I wanted to record it and release it.”
The material had originally been intended as the follow up to Phanerozoic II. Robin still believed deeply in it and felt it was an Ocean album that needed to exist. Finishing that record left him with little choice but to assemble the band again.
The music did not emerge from the rebuilding. In many ways, the need to finish the music caused the rebuilding.
Returning to the Collective
For more than a decade, The Ocean had operated as a comparatively stable band.
Robin embraced the advantages of that consistency. Musicians who spend years playing together develop an instinctive understanding of one another, and the longer a lineup remains intact, the tighter it becomes.
That period produced some of the strongest and most important work in The Ocean’s catalogue, including Pelagial, Phanerozoic I: Palaeozoic, Phanerozoic II: Mesozoic | Cenozoic and Holocene.
Once that era ended, the group gradually returned to the fluid collective structure that had defined its beginnings.
The current formation brings Robin and longtime bassist Mattias Hägerstrand together with drummer Jordi Farré, vocalists Lane Shi and Enrico Tiberi, and guitarists Emmanuel Jessua and Marco Gennaro.
Robin initially hoped the practical realities of touring might allow The Ocean to become a four piece. Instead, the collective expanded to seven musicians, including three guitarists. Most shows will feature two guitarists, while selected performances will allow all three to bring the layered arrangements of The Ocean’s records fully onto the stage.
It might not be the cheapest or simplest way to operate, but simplicity has rarely defined The Ocean.
Two Voices Finding Each Other Apart
One of the most immediately captivating elements of Solaris is the relationship between Lane and Enrico.
Their voices carry completely different colours. They answer, overlap and collide, sometimes feeling like separate characters and at other moments like opposing emotional forces inside the same consciousness.
What makes that relationship even more remarkable is that Lane and Enrico did not develop their parts together in the studio.
Robin worked with each vocalist separately due largely to their schedules. He might record a section with Enrico, then bring it to Lane and allow her to react. At other times, Enrico would respond to something Lane had already created.
This accidental process produced what Robin described as an almost dialectic relationship between the two voices. A musical question would receive an answer, which would then provoke another response.
The vocal arrangements were allowed to develop slowly across six or seven months. Weeks could pass between sessions, giving everyone time to live with an idea and determine whether it still carried the same power once the initial excitement had faded.
There was no certainty at the beginning. Robin, Lane and Enrico did not know one another particularly well, and they could not predict exactly what the collaboration would become. That uncertainty became part of the beauty of the process.
Rather than reaching creative dead ends, each vocalist appeared inspired by what the other had done. They knew how to take an existing idea, make it their own and leave another opening for a response.
Enrico also transformed the instrumental world of Solaris. As a pianist and multi instrumentalist, he contributed synthesizers and keyboards while bringing grand piano, celesta, Rhodes and Hammond into the heart of the record.
The result dramatically expanded both the stylistic range and emotional substance of The Ocean.
“Light Pollution” Connects Past and Present
The link between Holocene and Solaris is not only conceptual.
“Light Pollution” begins with electronic textures that immediately recall the previous record before opening into the heavier, more orchestral and rhythmically immense world of Solaris.
That connection is historical.
The song was developed while both albums were being written, and Peter Voigtmann originally wanted it to appear on Holocene. The recognisable synthesizer work at the beginning came from Peter, but Robin always felt the complete piece belonged with the material that became Solaris.
That made “Light Pollution” the natural first single.
“It’s kind of a nice link between the past and the present tense,” Robin explained.
Its lyrics examine the belief that technology automatically creates emancipation. Communication has become immediate and intercontinental, but that convenience has required the surrender of privacy. Satellite phones sit beside drones, while cables and phone lines share the same technological history as missiles.
Humanity remains permanently illuminated by cold white light. We have access to almost everything, but we have also made ourselves continuously visible.
The music carries that contradiction. Its electronic opening provides a familiar point of entry before the new incarnation of The Ocean reveals its full weight.
Beginning in Berlin and Ending at the Edge of the Known World
Solaris opens with the coordinates 52°30’11” N, 13°26’12” E.
They mark The Ocean’s studio and rehearsal space in Berlin, where the new collective met and spent much of the previous year shaping the album. It is both the literal location where the record emerged and the conceptual starting point of its voyage.
The closing coordinates, 51°28’30” S, 73°6’11” W, carry the listener to the Última Esperanza region in southern Patagonia.
Última Esperanza means “last hope.”
Robin explained that the name was connected to explorers searching for a route toward the Strait of Magellan. Their passage ended at a glacier, transforming the location into a powerful symbol of hope, desperation and the physical consequences of refusing to let that hope die.
Within Solaris, the destination also represents the edge of the known world faced by historical European explorers.
The record’s two narratives meet there.
One follows a celestial rescue vessel leaving a damaged Earth and travelling toward Solaris. The other presents that cosmic escape through the language of an old naval expedition into uncharted territory.
Andrei Tarkovsky’s 1972 film supplies the extraterrestrial destination. Solaris is an intelligent ocean capable of manipulating the minds of those who approach it, confronting them with childhood trauma and memories from their previous lives. Eventually, they can no longer distinguish genuine experience from simulacra.
The historical explorers travelled toward unknown continents. The album’s survivors travel into the cosmos. Both journeys begin with curiosity, but neither can escape the psychology of the people making them.
When Curiosity Becomes Greed
The album’s deepest questions emerged while Robin was reading historical travel diaries.
Exploration is usually presented as something admirable. For an artist, it represents curiosity, experimentation and the desire to enter creative territory nobody else has reached.
Robin identifies strongly with that instinct.
Artists deliberately enter uncertain places because discovering something unfamiliar can be intensely rewarding. Historical explorers possessed a similar drive, despite undertaking journeys that could last for years with no certainty they would survive or return.
The outcomes, however, were often catastrophic.
Expeditions that began with claims of discovery and noble purpose frequently ended in cultural imperialism, dictatorship and genocide. That forced Robin to question whether domination was merely a corruption of exploration or whether it was already contained within the desire to discover and possess something new.
He pointed to a revealing difference in language. While the English word “curiosity” sounds innocent, its German equivalent carries a meaning closer to a greed for something new.
That distinction unsettles the comforting idea of the artist as an entirely innocent explorer.
If the urge to cross a frontier can become the urge to control what lies beyond it, artists must also ask what they are doing when they enter cultures, sounds or experiences that are not their own.
Robin did not pretend Solaris provides a clean answer. The album is an investigation rather than a verdict.
That uncertainty is precisely what makes the subject worth exploring.
The Ocean Still Has More of the Story to Tell
Solaris is not a clean break from The Ocean’s past.
Its songs were written alongside Holocene. Its first single carries Peter Voigtmann’s unmistakable electronic language. Its story begins with the closing warning of “Subatlantic,” while its music was originally intended to follow Phanerozoic II.
At the same time, Lane, Enrico and the wider collective have transformed those older instrumental foundations into something Robin could not have predicted when he began writing them in 2021.
The album exists between eras. It is both an unfinished piece of the previous Ocean and the first complete statement from the new one.
Robin also finished our conversation with some encouraging words for Australian listeners. Nothing concrete has been arranged, but The Ocean hope to return to Australia as soon as possible, potentially in 2027.
For now, Solaris is ready to begin its voyage.
Watch my complete conversation with Robin Staps above as we discuss the origins of The Ocean, the songwriting behind Solaris, the new collective, Lane and Enrico’s vocal relationship, “Light Pollution,” Tarkovsky and the dangerous psychological line between exploration and domination.
Solaris Track Listing
- “52°30’11” N, 13°26’12” E”
- “Departure Song”
- “Light Pollution”
- “Simulacra”
- “Belligerence”
- “Ultima Esperanza”
- “Milk of My Dreams”
- “51°28’30” S, 73°6’11” W”
Solaris will be released on September 25, 2026 through Pelagic Records.
