The Ocean have shared “Belligerence,” the second single from their upcoming 12th studio album, Solaris. You can check the visualizer video below.
Solaris follows The Ocean’s 2023 album Holocene and is rooted in the late Soviet filmmaker Andrei Tarkovsky’s landmark 1972 science fiction film of the same name. As previously reported, the band described Solaris as the most ambitious album of their 25-year career. The album’s lead single, “Light Pollution,” explored humanity’s growing obsession with simulated reality and the pitfalls of 21st-century technology.
Where “Light Pollution” opened the campaign with slow-burning orchestral grandeur, “Belligerence” arrives as a harder, heavier statement — a song that makes deliberate reference to the band’s older catalog while charging it with a fresh and intensified energy. Thematically, the track draws on the same Tarkovsky framework that underpins Solaris as a whole, casting the destructive belligerence of contemporary political leaders against the filmmaker’s probing vision of memory, identity, and the limits of human nature.
The track also carries a direct thread back to Holocene. That album’s closing piece, “Subatlantic,” ended with the line “prepare for departure” — a phrase that now reads as an unmistakable signpost pointing toward the cosmic reckoning Solaris sets in motion.
Vocal duties on “Belligerence” are shared by The Ocean’s new frontline: Enrico Tiberi and Lane Shi. Shi records and performs as Otay:Onii and was formerly a member of experimental rock outfit Elizabeth Colour Wheel. Shi has garnered recognition across avant-garde and contemporary performance circles, having appeared at CTM Festival and the Berlin Biennale, and as part of Austrian choreographer Florentina Holzinger’s widely acclaimed opera Sancta. Both vocalists joined the band following the departure of longtime frontman Loïc Rossetti, part of the sweeping lineup overhaul The Ocean underwent between 2022 and 2025.
Solaris was recorded with a core lineup anchored by founding guitarist, songwriter, and lyricist Robin Staps, alongside longtime bassist Mattias Hägerstrand, new drummer Jordi Farré (also of Crippled Black Phoenix), and guitarists Emmanuel Jessua (Hypno5e) and Marco Gennaro. The album’s extended creative circle includes Thorsten Quaeschning of Tangerine Dream on modular synthesizers, Orestis Zafiriou on keys, Simen Eifring on trombone, and Jiawei Zhang on vibraphone. Jens Bogren — who previously handled mixing and mastering on Pelagial, Phanerozoic I, and Phanerozoic II — returns in the same role for Solaris.
