The Ocean will release their new record, and closer to their paleontology-inspired album series, Holocene on May 19. The Ocean is now streaming the new single "Sea Of Reed," which serves as a nod to the band's love of Radiohead and Mogwai, and comes alongside a music video directed by Adrian Shapiro.
"Like many Ocean lyrics, this song was inspired by the bible, the old testament tale of Exodus. God divided the waters of the Red Sea, the Sea of Reeds, so that the Israelites could flee from the Egyptians, and he clogged the wheels of their persecutors' chariots and then drowned them in the sea," said The Ocean's Robin Staps.
"The Old Testament is full of tales of miraculous healing, water turned into blood, locusts falling from the sky, the parting of the sea… but can there be space for the concept of love in a doctrine that relies on supernatural powers to prove its god's almightiness? A god who parts the waters of the sea to decide who's going to live and who's going to die is a fearful entity, and the lesson to be learnt from Exodus is that you should worship a god with such immense powers because otherwise he's gonna fuck with you real bad.
"But a god who needs miracles to convince his sheep to admire him and to follow his leadership can only be a vain god, and in vanity lies weakness and vulnerability, even for a god… because the vain self depends on the admiration of others. And this is the important note for the level of human relationships — dependency."
"We often look up to our loved ones as deities and we conceive of love as a supernatural force itself, something that hits us out of the blue and transforms us and the world around us. But when you remove the supernatural color grading, love is essentially a choice. It's a voluntary decision to let yourself in for something (and sometimes even to push yourself into something), or not.
"It's not something that happens to you if you're lucky, or doesn't if you're not. It essentially relies on meeting someone at eye level and while it can involve worship to some degree, too much of it is going to create a hierarchy that is going to ruin it."
