Interview mit Robin Staps von The Ocean

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Music streaming and the associated more or less unlimited variety of songs, whether old or new, are having a lasting impact on the way we listen to music. Far too often, we spend only a few seconds judging a song—or even an entire album—simply because the next potential auditory treat may be just one click away. Accordingly, many artists are changing their release strategies: instead of putting out a new album with one or two advance singles every two years, they are increasingly releasing a new web single every few months. As a result, by the time the new album comes out, a large proportion of its songs are already familiar. Even so, it is conceivable that this strategy may be vital for bands if they want to stay on listeners’ radar—the sheer volume of music available in real time has become overwhelming.

Unsurprisingly, the concept album has become more the exception than the rule in this day and age, since it requires a considerably more time-intensive engagement than a web single, often both in terms of content and music. The Berlin-based post-metal band THE OCEAN successfully walks this tightrope, writing complex music that is nevertheless catchy, making it far more accessible—and stimulating both the brain and the neck muscles in the process (the author is aware that the brain is not a muscle). And Robin Staps and his fellow musicians have the success to prove it: THE OCEAN grew more popular with each album, played larger venues to bigger audiences, and successfully cemented their status as one of the leading forces in post-metal.

At present, however, THE OCEAN are going through a period of transition – and in two respects. On the one hand, there is the new thematic territory the band explores with its latest release, „Solaris„. On the other, a fairly extensive personnel reshuffle has given the band a noticeably different sound from the „Phanerozoic“ and „Holocene“ eras. Three long-standing members – David Ramis Åhfeldt (guitar), Loïc Rossetti (vocals), and Paul Seidel (drums) – have left the band and been replaced by Enrico Tiberi (vocals, DARK SIDE, BRIGHT SIDE), Lane Shi (vocals, formerly of ELIZABETH COLOUR WHEEL and OTAY:ONII), Emmanuel Jessua (guitar, HYPNO5E), Marco Gennaro (guitar, also of DARK SIDE, BRIGHT SIDE), and Jordi Farré (formerly of CRIPPLED BLACK PHOENIX). As the band’s leader and guitarist Robin Staps explains in our interview, it has been a far from straightforward process.

Hi Robin, thanks so much for taking the time. “Solaris” marks the start of a new creative phase in THE OCEAN’s history, also in terms of content/concept, because we’re leaving the album cycle inspired by paleontology and thus the familiar story of humankind behind – “Solaris” is basically science fiction. Can you tell us a little bit about the story behind its creation?
Over the course of the last year I learned a lot. I read a lot of other things than what I’d been dealing with over the past years. I read a lot of travel reports by historical researchers and explorers. And in the meantime of course I must have watched Tarkovsky’s “Solaris” film about ten times. So yeah, I needed something new.

The series of concept albums about Earth history was actually supposed to be over with “Phanerozoic I”. And then “Holocene” was basically this little add-on that happened simply because that album came together relatively spontaneously. I actually was already working on “Solaris” at the time, or on the songs that have now become “Solaris”. And then Peter Voigtmann, our synth guy at the time, sent me electronic ideas of his. I found that very inspiring at the time. That was in the middle of the COVID pandemic, and then I started building THE OCEAN songs on top of that. It worked amazingly well. And then suddenly there was this album that was kind of an unwanted child, really. (laughs) But we were totally blown away by it. That’s why all the “Solaris” material got put in a drawer for the time being and we focused on “Holocene” first. And that was basically yet another album that originally wasn’t planned at all within that Earth-history concept-album series. And after “Phanerozoic II” I was actually already kind of at the point where I thought, alright, that’s enough now.

So in that sense it was new territory, yeah, and very interesting new territory. And the whole album concept really developed very slowly out of the process itself – what it ended up becoming. At the beginning, the basic idea was to make an album that was based on Tarkovsky’s film “Solaris”. And that’s what it became. But it’s not a direct soundtrack to the film or anything. The album doesn’t follow the film’s chronology, though; instead it references certain chapters, certain parts, certain scenes from it.

And at the same time we wanted a story: in the end it’s a journey, away from Earth to Solaris or out into space, however you want to put it. And we wanted to tell it like a historical sea voyage. And against that backdrop I also read a lot of those explorers’ accounts. And that was totally exciting, too. For me it was just important that something really new comes now, something I can engage with intellectually as well. And that absolutely worked.

I recently stumbled across Tarkovsky in a different context: the film „Stalker“ was recommended to me, which I haven’t seen yet, but which also seems very exciting in terms of the production circumstances and aesthetics…
You know we also made an album about „Stalker“? That’s our „Pelagial“ album from 2013. It’s actually based on the film. And when I originally wrote the lyrics for the album, those were all original subtitles from the film. And then our publisher at the time said that that wouldn’t work and we couldn’t do that. But by that point we’d already started recording it. Then I re-recorded everything again with Loïc, wrote new lyrics. A few quotes are still in there – on „Solaris“ there are also some quote passages from the film. But originally it was actually intended for all the lyrics of „Pelagial“ to be „Stalker“ subtitles. We often have two narratives that are interwoven. With „Solaris“ it’s actually exactly the same again now. And with „Pelagial“ it was like that as well. The one narrative is basically the journey from the ocean’s surface through the different pelagic layers down into the depths. But lyrically the album is also based on „Stalker“, which is, after all, also a journey through this „Zone“, this city, where people’s wishes then come true. So the idea was to tell this journey analogously, as a journey into the depths of the human psyche or into the abysses of the psyche. And that’s also a very fitting analogy to the journey into the depths of the sea. That was the idea behind „Pelagial“ back then.

In the 2010s, THE OCEAN was more of a collective than a band. Lots of lineup changes, lots of guest musicians, then from “Heliocentric” on, longer periods with at least partly the same musicians. How did the current personnel change feel after this long time with the same lineup? Did Paul, Loïc and David’s exit come more spontaneously for you, and what happened after it was clear that the three of them would be leaving THE OCEAN?
Yeah, that was a relatively long process. The old lineup fell apart over the course of 2024. But of course, that was also the end of a process that had been simmering for quite a while. We’d simply hit a dead end. Somehow with the band and this specific formation of the band. Paul, our old drummer, summed it up pretty well – he said: “We’re playing the fattest shows of our career, but I don’t feel anything anymore.” And when I heard that, it was clear to me too: Yeah, this is over now. Then it’s also not right to keep going. If you have to talk yourself into doing something, then it just doesn’t work. So for all of us, that was always what we consciously wanted to do with our lives. And something we also put a lot of time into – basically our entire lives. Since the end of the pandemic, we’ve played over 100 shows. That’s more than half your life, if you also count travel days and rehearsals and so on. And in that sense, it’s understandable that at some point you reach the point where you maybe don’t want to make that big commitment anymore. And that’s how it was for Loïc, Paul and David, for very different reasons. David, for example, became a father, so in that respect it was a very simple matter. We just didn’t all have the same answer to the question anymore: “Do you still want to devote your time to this band?” And two of us said yes – that was Matthias and me – and three said no. And so the situation became relatively clear fairly quickly.

But we then decided to keep playing the shows that had already been planned, played “HELLFEST” as the last show with the old lineup, and we also managed to focus on the positive aspects of our many years of good collaboration there, to enjoy all of that and celebrate it. At least that’s how it was for me, and I think it was basically the same for everyone else, too. It was a wonderful show, a good ending, and the fact that we played together in the band for ten years is, even in hindsight, kind of a miracle. So much has to fit together for a relationship of five people to last that long, and for you to decide against the usual things our friends at our age devote themselves to, namely mostly family or better-paid career jobs, and to keep going with the band. So in hindsight I think it’s like a little miracle, and something we were all proud of, and that was important to us.

But for me it was also a shock, because we had put so much time into the project, and then everything was working: the shows kept getting better and the tours kept getting better. In the end it was really comfortable, so that we really could choose what we actually want to do. And really a lot of people came to the shows – that wasn’t always the case. They paid money for a ticket and the fees got better, and just when it finally really started going well, suddenly the air was out. And for me that was just a bit hard to understand.

But I also realized that people have different stress tolerances. I think I have a relatively high one, and not everyone has one as high as mine, which is totally okay, and in that respect we just got to that point and then, I think, brought it to a good end. With the new lineup there’s now of course a completely different energy and a dynamic that we hadn’t had for years.

And now you can’t keep up anymore… (laughs)
That can actually happen now, yeah, exactly. (laughs) I mean, when you surround yourself with fresh, new people you didn’t have anything to do with before, then in a way you’re starting from zero. And that’s super exciting and thrilling, and at the same time you also notice that certain routines you used to have first have to form again, and that’s the process we’re in right now. And that affects a whole range of areas. Of course it affects the live routine on stage. When you’ve played 300 shows together, everything is just so insanely locked in, and you can’t replace that with 30 rehearsals. You really have to play a certain number of shows for that to happen. So I think we still have a long way to go there. Even if they’re all super talented musicians, the thing is you have to relearn playing together – there’s no fast forward. You just have to go through it.

And when it comes to the organization too, and certain responsibilities, who does what and so on, that all has to be rebuilt again now. Sometimes that’s a laborious process, but overall there’s just this fresh energy there that feels really good and is important. I’m 45 years old, and I need that too. I somehow also need people around me where I can tell they’re into it. If I feel like I have to persuade them to please play some tour or a festival in Brazil and actually nobody wants to, then it doesn’t sit well with me either. So you have to be into it – that’s really important. I’m very sensitive about it when I notice that I’m then in this kind of petitioner position, or have to try to talk people into it. That’s not good; it has to come from your own drive. That’s how it is again now, and in that respect what happened was good for everyone involved, I think. The old members have peace and quiet from THE OCEAN, the peace and quiet they wanted, and I have a new team of people who are really into it – and that’s very nice.

Can you tell us a bit about your new bandmates? How did you meet and how did it then turn into working together?
So Jordi Farré was the first one we really found through posts on social media. We needed a drummer because Paul didn’t want to do the „HELLFEST“ show anymore, and everyone else from the old lineup still wanted to play it. And because of that we had a very specific date and a challenge: learn a 90- or 70-minute set within the next three months. So we posted that, then got loads of messages, and Jordi was the one who actually joined last. At that point we’d basically almost decided on someone else already, but then he delivered so insanely hard that it was somehow clear that it was by far the best performance. It all just felt right. But that was classic auditioning.

With everyone else it wasn’t like that at all. Everyone else were chance encounters that just happened to come about over the course of 2025. So Jordi got the ball rolling, we decided on him at the start of 2025 and „HELLFEST“ was in June. And over the course of the first half of the year, I first met Lane and then Enrico through Marco. And Manu was the only one I’d known for ages via HYPNO5E, and we’d also played shows together back in 2006 with THE OCEAN and HYPNO5E.

 

Manu was my first idea for a new guitarist – I asked him right away, but at first he didn’t reply for weeks because he was busy with HYPNO5E. In the meantime Marco got in touch with me, introduced himself as a guitarist and a long-time fan of the band – and everything he sent us sounded really good. Then I listened to his old band, and it’s a band he had together with Enrico: DARK SIDE, BRIGHT SIDE. During the pandemic they released a hopelessly underrated album, or one that got lost in the pandemic, and it’s really good. And when I listened to that, because of Marco on guitar, I also started paying attention to the singer, and then I replied to him that I could totally imagine it all – and that he should just bring his singer along right away. Then we met in Berlin, Marco, Enrico and me – that was basically the beginning.

And by sheer coincidence, Lane ended up with me: We do regular hot pot dinners with the label crew from “Pelagic Records”. And one of us is from China and is an incredibly good cook, he makes handmade noodles – and he brought Lane along; he knew her through an acquaintance from Shanghai, and then I also realized that I know her from the “ROADBURN FESTIVAL”, from her former band ELIZABETH COLOUR WHEEL. We just had a lot we could talk about, and afterwards I took another really in-depth listen to her solo material, and right from the start I thought: I could somehow imagine that working super well for THE OCEAN. That would be a completely different direction, something radically different, but at the same time it could work wonderfully – but I didn’t ask her.

In the meantime, I’d gotten to know Enrico better. He immediately started doing covers of old THE OCEAN songs, and that worked great. And then, after we played “HELLFEST”, Lane wrote to me. I’d sent her a few pre-productions of the new album, she’d also sent me her new album – in the meantime I’d also signed her to “Pelagic Records”, with her own project OTAY:ONII – and then she said she could imagine singing over that pre-production of mine. And I thought to myself: “Very nice, I’d actually already had that thought too, but I didn’t ask you because I didn’t know how you’d react.”

And that’s how it all came together, over two or three months in the end – basically all chance encounters. After “HELLFEST”, we suddenly moved very quickly into working on this “Solaris” album. Like I said, the music was already there; the original song ideas came from the pandemic period and were only put on hold back then because of “Holocene”, which was being created at the same time. So we also had concrete material we could work with, but it was all instrumental, and all the vocals then came about over the course of the last year.

On the guest musicians: At first glance, TANGERINE DREAM seems like a great fit for a space opera in terms of analog sound and synthesizer aesthetics. What was the idea behind working with Thorsten Quaeschning, and how did it come about?
That was a completely spontaneous boozy idea of mine. One morning I’d seen a post by Thorsten in my Instagram feed that he’d done something with Christoph Hahn from SWANS. That was right when we were recording at the “Hansa Studios”, and then there was kind of this connection: TANGERINE DREAM recorded at the “Hansa Studios” too – and then I suddenly thought, it would actually be totally awesome to ask him if he’d be up for doing something on the album. So I messaged him, and he replied right away and came by the next day while we were recording there – and then we talked about music for a long time and very carefully. It was really interesting because we come from a totally different background. I think that goes for all of us in THE OCEAN and Thorsten and TANGERINE DREAM: that, fundamentally, we’re just driven by a curiosity that pushes us to collaborate with other people who also have a different background. Because those are usually the most exciting collabs – the coolest stuff comes out of them – and that’s how we kind of felt each other out a bit in the studio and just talked about music.

And then it really looked like Thorsten was up for doing something. We still didn’t know exactly to what extent, and he just wanted to start once the bass was recorded. In turn, we didn’t do that until months later, and that’s why the whole thing really happened at the last minute, because we had to record bass first. But about a week before the album mix, we went to Thorsten’s studio for a whole week and worked with him on this album. That was insanely inspiring – the guy is really unbelievably well-versed in his field, both technically and musically, and, like I said, he’s a very curious musician. And what’s absolutely remarkable is: you can describe a sound to him and he immediately knows how and on which synthesizer he can create it. Everything is wired up and immediately ready, plug and play, and it was very cool working with him.

At the beginning, I think he needed a bit of time to settle into our weird cosmos and dive into it. There are just a lot of rhythmic intricacies that might not even be that obvious when you hear the music for the first time – but when you start counting along, something is different with every repetition. So there are at least a few songs – “Belligerence”, for example, is a track on the new album – where something in the count is constantly changing, and that meant he didn’t have an easy time with his analog four-on-the-floor step sequencers. He really played a lot by hand, and some super beautiful things came out of that.

In the end, after that one week we had far more than we could fit on the album, because basically everything was already finished. Vocals were done, and anyway, “Solaris” was already very dense sonically, even without Thorsten – and on top of that, Orestis Zafiriou had also worked on the new album and contributed electronic passages.

What, specifically, did Orestis Zafiriou contribute?
Orestis was the first person I brought it up to, because I think his electronic work with PLAYGROUNDED, also a “Pelagic Records” band, is insanely awesome. He just does really modern stuff that actually comes more from the techno world, but within hard music it’s also placed in a very fitting way – like with PLAYGROUNDED, who, by the way, are releasing a fantastic new album this Friday. So he was basically my first thought, and he’d been working on the album in parallel the whole time and contributed just as much as Thorsten. He also plays on every track, but the two of them didn’t work with each other at all, because the thing with Thorsten was such a last-minute deal. And then we suddenly had two interpretations of the electronic component for the same album from two people who hadn’t spoken a word to each other.

That was a totally absurd situation, but in the end it worked really well, because the harmonic basic framework is of course the same for both of them. In that respect, a lot of things actually fit together really well, and we rarely had the case where the two of them did something so similar that you then had to decide. It was all super exciting. But the album was already very heavily loaded, and that’s why we couldn’t fit everything in.

Then we made the plan that we’ll release a parallel instrumental version of the album where the synths are really in the foreground – but at a later point in time. We’ve already started working on it with Jens Bogren. Right now it’s very overloaded, but if you throw the vocals out, it gets better. We’re also going to throw out a whole bunch of guitars and really run mostly drums, bass, and synths on this version of the album. And that way you end up with songs that are basically the same as on the “Solaris” main album we’re releasing now, but at the same time sound completely different. That’s a very exciting thing, but unfortunately there’s just absolutely no time for it right now, because we’re in the middle of all this album-release hustle and bustle. But as soon as that’s over, I’m really looking forward to continuing work on it with Thorsten.

I think this collab was a lot of fun for both of us, or for all of us, and there will definitely be more to come, I think. But this time we really want to do it separately, because it’s going to be a different album, and it would have drowned next to the main album. That’s why we decided not to drop it in parallel right away, but to take a bit of time for it too and then really do it as a separate release. And then maybe also to play live in the lineup with Thorsten. That would be something the two of us – or all of us – would really like to do, but it just takes time to prepare, and that simply wasn’t in place yet.

“Ultima Esperanza,” “Milk Of My Dreams,” and the outro are linked by a synth sample, even though the three are musically very different. The last two songs are extremely krautrock-ish, if not outright technoid and basically completely without any metal influences, which seems very unusual and new by THE OCEAN standards. What’s the idea behind that?
Yeah, so “Milk Of My Dreams” is kind of the prime piece where Torsten really delivered massively. He was tweaking the filters in real time on a Novation-synth, and that became very important for the song. The synth at the beginning that you’re referring to is a Korg MS-20 – I actually already built that in my pre-production with some cheap Logic instrument, and then he basically recreated it on a real hardware MS-20 – and in the end it’s the sum of two sounds. But yeah, on “Ultima Esperanza” you hear a lot of Thorsten, and also on “Belligerence,” also on “Simulacra,” so really he plays on every track on the album. But like I said, the album was so dense that on the vocal version we couldn’t put it as much in the foreground as it actually deserves. That’s why there was the idea to do this second version, too.

Unlike the last albums, which were recorded bit by bit in different places around the world and in different studios, this time you went to the legendary Berlin “Hansa Studios”. How did you come to that decision, and did you really record all instruments there?
We actually only wanted to record drums at “Hansa Studios”. But then it turned out that we found so many awesome old vintage keyboards there, and Enrico is also a virtuoso pianist. That’s why, in the end, we used part of the drums session to additionally record celesta, Rhodes, and piano there as well, alongside the drums. Everything else we did ourselves: we recorded guitars, bass, and vocals in our own studio in Berlin. So at “Hansa Studios” it really was only drums and all the analog keyboards and synths. And then Thorsten’s stuff at Thorsten’s. And then Orestis and Simon, who plays trombone on the album – just like on the “Holocene” live shows we played. We had him with us live there, too. They just recorded that at home as well.

How finished was „Solaris“ already when the others joined? Were the newcomers still able to really put their stamp on it, and did that change a lot of what you had pre-produced?
So the actual song structures didn’t change much. The songs existed in the same order. The album was actually written that way, too. In a specific order. All of these songs happened one after another like that, and that basically didn’t change much.

But everything was instrumental. That means all the vocals were created from scratch. There weren’t any bass lines either. Matthias composed all of that, or the two of us together over the course of the last year. And of course Jordi also reshaped the programmed drums in his own way and simply made them musical. I mean, I’m just not a drummer. I program drums, and in part he stuck to it very meticulously. He really learned the material too, which I thought was really awesome. But a real drummer obviously just does it a lot better in the end.

So in that sense, every single one of them definitely brought their personality and their talent massively into „Solaris„. And what you hear in the end now is the sum of all the individual parts. So of course it’s not just my composition – everyone contributed a very important part.

Thank you so, so much for the conversation and your time. All the best for the album release and the next shows.