Exclusive Premiere: The Ocean’s Emphatic New Instrumental Single ‘Turritopsis Dohrnii’

Back in 2013, when their album Pelegial released, German metallers The Ocean’s guitarist and founder Robin Staps went into great detail about how the album’s concept””both sonic and lyrical””traced “a journey from the surface to the bottom of the sea.”

Turns out their latest single “Turritopsis Dohrnii” is a track recorded from the Pelegial sessions, thus continuing the sea-themed concepts. Part of their upcoming post-rock and post-metal compilation In The Twilight, These Rocks Have Teeth (set to release on September 29 via Staps’ Pelagic Records), the instrumental song is inspired by a species of jellyfish which is technically immortal. Staps says, “Jellyfish are weird creatures. They start their lives as polyps, which are basically something closer to a plant than to an animal, something that grows on a rock. These polyps reproduce asexually, by cell division. The result becomes the free-swimming medusa, a jellyfish. Jellies then reproduce sexually, before they die”¦ except this little guy here.”

Mirroring something of a Discovery Channel narrator, Staps says turritopsis dohrnii return from adult to polyp state after reproducing, sinking to the ocean floor to restart their lifecycle “infinitely.” The guitarist relates this to their track, “This track begins and ends with the same part, reflecting that eternal cycle. Learning about this tiny creature made me think about how we are desperately striving for physical rejuvenation and intellectual immortality”¦ the other side of the coin is the fact that we barely see any old people these days. In a city like Berlin, everyone is young, healthy and pretty. Elder people get locked away in homes that most of us will never get to see or visit, unless we have family members unfortunate enough to become old.”

The Ocean reworked the track and are now more ready than ever to get back into the studio. While they released a split with Japanese post-rock band Mono in 2015 (Transcendental) featuring another song “Death In Reverse,” a full-length follow-up is still in the works. Staps says, “We have consciously decided to take our time with this next album, and we all focused on different stuff for a while, which was really important in order to understand what it is that we are doing and why we’re doing it and why we want to keep doing it. I think we all found the answers now, collectively and each of us individually.” Keeping to their strengths, Staps indicates that it may just be another double-disc or double album. He says, “You can expect a new album in 2018”¦ or two.”

Listen to “Turritopsis Dohrnii”