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Music

Listen to the Reissue of The Ocean’s Post-Metal Masterpiece, “Precambrian”

The premiere of the reissue of the classic album features a new recording of "Rhyacian," and a completely new record is soon to follow.
Meredith Balkus
translated by Meredith Balkus
Brooklyn, US

This article originally appeared on Noisey Germany.

The Ocean has always been a special band. In the two years following the group's founding in 2000, 40 different musicians joined and left the lineup before the project even left the practice room. At some point, the lineup stood and two albums came to fruition, but it was only thanks to the double LP Precambrian (2007) that The Ocean toured extensively around the world, and established themselves as a post-metal giant. In a performance that spanned nearly 84 minutes, they captured the early developmental phase of the Earth itself. The genre just calls for epicness.

To adapt this momentous release to the modern day, Precambrian is now being released as a reissue on three LPs. In addition, the track "Rhyacian" was re-recorded with the band’s current lineup—a teaser of what’s to come in the future. After all, anybody who thinks that something like this reissue is just random operating for The Ocean and has no deeper meaning, should listen to Crazy Frog’s “Axel F” until the end of days. Phanerozoic, the new, two-part album, picks up exactly where the last note of Precambrian faded out almost 11 years ago. The eponymous record describes the latest geological age and is literally translated to “The Age of Visible Life.” The first part of the record will be released in September 2018, and the second one is dated to come out in 2019. The first audio is now being recorded in Iceland.

“We were looking for an isolated place in a cold and beautiful environment to get us into the right mood for making this record,” says Robin Staps, the guitarist and mastermind behind The Ocean. “The new album will start off bleak, cold and heavy… and then evolve and diversify throughout the second half.”

Until we can hear it for ourselves and really fathom what he means by that, let’s travel back a few thousand million years into the past and listen to the newly relaunched, old Precambrian. Precambrian will be released on February 23 on Pelagic Records. You can pre-order it here.