The Ocean have shared "Milk of My Dreams," the second half of the 20-minute closing piece on their 12th studio album, Solaris, out September 25 via Pelagic Records. The track is an unexpectedly electronic, dark, and danceable collaboration with Tangerine Dream bandleader Thorsten Quaeschning.

Pre-order Solaris: https://orcd.co/theocean-solaris

New vocalist Enrico Tiberi wrote much of the track as a variation on themes from the preceding song "Ultima Esperanza," before it was rearranged by Robin Staps and shaped significantly by Quaeschning, whom the band met while tracking drums at Berlin's Hansa Studios. They went on to spend a week at Quaeschning's studio working on the record's electronic elements.

Quaeschning on the collaboration: "It was a real pleasure to work on the new album by The Ocean Collective... most hardware step sequencers no longer worked in the conventional way [given the shifting time signatures], so I decided to play many of the sequences by hand."

Solaris takes its name and thematic backbone from Andrei Tarkovsky's 1972 film, using the story of an intelligent ocean to probe questions about exploration, power, and ecological collapse — asking what it costs to be driven, and where the line falls between exploring new terrain and dominating it.

SOLARIS TRACKLIST:
1. 52°30'11" N, 13°26'12" E
2. Departure Song
3. Light Pollution
4. Simulacra
5. Belligerence
6. Ultima Esperanza
7. Milk Of My Dreams
8. 51°28'30" S, 73°6'11" W