A Whole Lot of New Info About The Ocean’s New Album Pelagial

Last week we took a stab at guessing what the new album from German progressive metal masters The Ocean might be like by gleaning together pieces of information from the band’s Facebook page and other sources. No longer do we have to infer: the band has re-launched their official website with a shit-ton of information about their new album, Pelagial, set to come out on April 30th via Metal Blade. And, as is always the case with this band, it’s absolutely fascinating.

The website consists of five sub-headings that each refer to a depth zone in the ocean (and a corresponding musical movement on the album), and each of them contains a couple of paragraphs about Pelagial as well as a roughly minute-long sample of music. The website is tastefully done and fully consistent with the concept of Pelagial… this is why I love The Ocean so fucking much, the attention to detail in every facet of their game (not the least of which is their music).

I want you to explore the website yourself — and, of course, to listen to the music samples — so I’m not going to re-post all the text therein, but I will share a couple of highlights with you here:

The concept of the album is made evident in its title, Pelagial. Listeners will be further submersed as they journey with the band, beginning at the surface of the ocean and plunging through all five pelagic depth zones: epipelagic, mesopelagic, bathyalpelagic, abyssopelagic, and hadopelagic. In synch with diminishing light and increasing pressure as one dives or sinks deeper into the ocean, the album begins rather light and progressively gets heavier and slows as the band reaches the unfathomable depths of the hadopelagic zone, characterized by complete darkness and a thousandfold increased pressure as compared to surface level. What is remarkable about Pelagial is that this is not some detached conceptual idea; this can actually be heard and felt while listening to the album.

Oh fuck yes!!

This continuous downward movement is also reflected in the album’s sound: starting with a clean, produced “surface”-sound and progressing towards a more open, ambient, distorted and abrasive sound for the doomy depth-passages at the end of the album. To make that happen, Jens Bogren (Opeth, Katatonia) had to face the challenge of mix the album in one go, which resulted in the epic amount of 288 audio tracks!

Fap fap fap

A special acrylic boxset edition of the album will be released through Pelagic Records, both CD and vinyl formats. These heavy acrylic boxes will contain the CD digipak (Metal Blade Records) vs. the 2 vinyl gatefolds (Pelagic Records) respectively; which will be “buried” underneath 5 thick acrylic layers, coloured in different hues of transparent blue, reflecting the 5 pelagial depth zones.

Those pre-orders are available now through The Ocean’s website, by the way. Head on over, read up on Pelagial, give the music a listen and order yours today.