German prog metal band The Ocean have announced their 10th studio album.

Revealed on Thursday, Holocene will be released on May 19 via Pelagic Records. A new single from the album titled “Parabiosis” arrives with a music video directed by Drew Storcks, which can be seen below.

The band collectively said this about their new single:

“[The song is] about stem cell research and the cosmetics industry’s war against aging and our society's quest for rejuvenation elixirs, plastic surgery etc, which leads to the question of— how far can and shall we go regarding bio-engineering and medicinal progress?
The cult of eternal youth has lead to death being hidden from our everyday lives. You literally see no old people in our modern inner cities anymore, everyone is young and healthy and the sick and dying are locked away in clinics and retirement homes where they won’t remind the general public of the fact that we are all going to die one day, which keeps us stuck on a hamster wheel of spending the time of our lives working jobs we hate to afford things we don’t need…”

The eight-track album was recorded by the band at their synth player Peter Voigtmann’s studio Die Mühle in the rural North of Germany and at the band's own Oceanland 2.0 studio in Berlin. The Ocean guitarist Robin Staps said this about working on the album:

“The writing process of every album we’ve ever made started with me coming up with a guitar riff, a drumbeat or a vocal idea. This album is different since every single song is based on a musical idea that was originally written by Peter (Voigtmann, synths). He came up with these amazing synth parts that were already sounding huge in pre-production, and he sent me some of those raw, unfinished ideas during mid lockdown 2020... and while it was all electronic, it had that definite Ocean vibe to it. It made me want to pick up my guitar instantly… and so I did, and it didn't take long until we had an inspiring creative exchange that was heading towards totally unforeseen but very exciting places.
While we still think that Jens Bogren's mixes of our previous 3 albums sound great, we wanted a more organic sound this time around. So we set out on a mission to get test mixes done by a number of people, from close friends to some pretty big names, but none of them came close to how we wanted this record to sound, and after a few months we got really frustrated.”

Pre-orders for Holocene can be made here. The album follows the band’s 2020 studio album Phanerozoic II: Mesozoic / Cenozoic.