After twenty years in the game, The Ocean are pretty much prog royalty. Regardless of what you think of their bewildering choice of album titles, the sheer scale of the ‘Phanerozoic’ duology has rightfully put respect on mastermind Robin Staps’ name: it’s him, after all, who’s chosen to continue the project in the face of drastic lineup changes. New record ‘Solaris’ has a host of new fingerprints all over it— sweeping and grandiose as it may be, this is most definitely a transitionary project for the collective.

‘Solaris’ falls in line with the humongous post-metal of ‘Holocene’ before it, even when the personnel behind the two albums has changed dramatically: it’s a testament to Staps’ vision that The Ocean are still intact at all, let alone continuing to soldier forward like this. In all honesty, the mark the band’s five new members have left on the project’s well-established sound is fairly minimal— it’s only the wild vocalisations of Lane Shi that explore something completely new from records previous, and her contributions are absolutely delightful at every turn. ‘Solaris’ is the first album of a new era for the group, but that doesn’t mean it’s some dramatic turning of a page. Lead single ‘Light Pollution’ is full of all the same impressive bass lines, deafening walls of guitar and climactic builds that The Ocean are known for: if anything, it’s playing things relatively safe.

Where the album does separate itself from a record like ‘Holocene’ is in its celestial ambitions, which are inescapable on this 70-minute juggernaut. ‘Solaris’ is pulling from the Stanisław Lem novel of the same name, giving us a project attempting to mirror the mystique and the uncompromising scale of an unknowable alien world— in its commitment to being so incredibly large, this adaptation may actually be more faithful than Andrei Tarkovsky’s much-beloved film, which focuses on a human aspect that neither the book nor this record has any time for. The Ocean may play with themes of communication and emotion on ‘Belligerence,’ but neither the track’s lyrics nor its dense instrumentation can possibly be described as ‘intimate.’ Like the alien planet Lem described in 1961, these twelve tracks are distant, complex and near-impossible to grasp in their entirety.

If ‘Solaris’ fails to capture that sense of cosmic horror at all, it’s because the band are actually pulling from a relatively mundane pool of ideas (at least by their own standards, which are admittedly quite lofty). The Ocean’s extensive lineup changes over the past two years have resulted in a project that plays that signature post-metal sound completely straight, with few genuine surprises at play: three-part epic ‘Simulacra’ may wind on (and on, and on) for a whopping seventeen minutes, but that time is devoted more to repetitive vocal hooks than to meaningful progressions. Staps’ aim of capturing the immense reach of science fiction works against him here, on a song that stretches its ideas far too thin, and it’s not the only offender. Just like Tarkovsky’s film version, ‘Solaris’ is a slow burn, and one easily criticised for its poor pacing.

In an odd twist, this may be one of The Ocean’s most vocally driven works to date— they do have two singers now, to be fair, which might explain why fantastic opener ‘Departure Song’ focuses more on the strong chemistry between Tiberi and Shi than it does on its dizzying prog metal instrumentation. It’s telling that the aggressive energy and the flashy guitar leads that opens ‘Belligerence’ are far more memorable than the slow-moving atmospheric pieces the cut ends up incorporating, even if sound design continues to be a strength The Ocean are more than happy to show off. Ultimately, the band can only rest on their laurels for so long, which is why ‘Simulacra’ and ‘Ultima Esperanza’ have you checking your watch much more readily than ‘Light Pollution.’ It’s only the eery electronica of ‘Milk Of My Dreams’ that truly breaks the mould: surprise surprise, the song pulls you back in quite effectively.

‘Solaris’ is a big big album, but it isn’t the most confident one Staps has put together: beneath its bold exterior and its cosmic aspirations, the record betrays the extent to which lineup changes have rocked the boat behind the scenes. This is a prog metal success— of course it is— but it only gets that far by wringing The Ocean’s musical towel dry. In spite of winners like ‘Departure Song’ and ‘Light Pollution,’ we’re still waiting for this new ensemble to come into their own.