Season of Mist is proud to announce the release of the expansive seventh album from …and Oceans. While they’ve always ebbed and flowed between different extremes, The Regeneration Itinerary surges onto the scene as the symphonic black metal band’s most expansive experiment yet. Both darkly cinematic and shockingly cerebral, the album is a lesson in contrasts – between chaos and order, dissolution and regeneration.
The Regeneration Itinerary comes out this Friday, May 23 on Season of Mist, but you can hear all 10 unpredictable songs today by listening to the full album stream on the Season of Mist YouTube channel.
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Thirty years into their ebullient career, …and Oceans have now assembled a body of work that absorbs the band’s entire lineage. The Regeneration Itinerary synthesizes the Finnish band’s disparate identities into a two-sided whole. From the trance-inducing intensity of opener and lead single “Inertiae” and maze-like riffs of “Prophetical Mercury Implement” to the sharper death metal edge of “Förnyelse i Tre Akter”, the album is a dance with duality: body and spirit, destruction and rebirth, copper and mercury.
Vocalist Mathias Lillmåns draws inspiration from alchemical symbolism and the interplay between light and shadow. Guitarists Timo Kontio and Teemu Saari, bassist Pyry Hanski, keyboardist Antti Simonen, and drummer Kauko Kuusisalo flesh out his visions with layered textures and a frenetic precision that’s anchored by both the visceral production of Juho Räihä and the finishing touch of Tore Stjerna’s mix and master at Necromorbus Studio. Rebirth is never static. This itinerary is ever-evolving.
More advanced praise for The Regeneration Itinerary
“With The Regeneration Itinerary, …and Oceans come full circle, integrating their past into material that should ignite a sense of homecoming for longtime fans” – Angry Metal Guy
“The Regeneration Itinerary’ is the Finnish group’s most cohesive and visionary work—a Dantesque journey through opposites, mental filters, and sonic rebirths.” – Rock Hard IT
“…and Oceans’ new album continues their streak of massive black metal releases that are so beyond ‘just regular bizarre’ that they’re nearly charming” – No Clean Singing
“Just imagine an inescapable Black Metal void suddenly filled with brightly coloured Techno, Folk, Dance, Classical and Industrial Noise” – Ghost Cult
“I expected something big, but I got something huge. The Regeneration Itinerary is a great record. It bridges old and new, allowing …and Oceans to flourish and put their best collective foot forward” – Wonderbox Metal
“There are moments here that soar, moments that I can connect with to a literally physical level.” – The Razor’s Edge
“…And Oceans is more motivated than ever, and The Regeneration Itinerary also shows us that the band knows perfectly well how to draw the best from its roots to make a concentrate of darkness, rage, but also catchy tones.” – Acta Infernalis
“The astral and symphonic journey of the Finnish band continues with enviable black metal experimentation and sonic compactness.” – Metalitalia
Tracklist:
1. Inertiae (4:30) [WATCH]
2. Förnyelse i Tre Akter (5:07) [WATCH]
3. Chromium Lungs, Bronze Optics (4:29)
4. The Form and the Formless (3:32)
5. Prophetical Mercury Implement (6:57) [WATCH]
6. The Fire in Which We Burn (3:04)
7. The Ways of Sulphur (4:17)
8. I Am Coin, I Am Two (4:25)
9. Towards the Absence of Light (4:49)
10. The Terminal Filter (5:22)
11. Copper Blood, Titanium Scars (Bonus Track) (4:14)
12. The Discord Static (Bonus Track) (3:35)
Full runtime: 54:22
Chaos chameleons. Nocturnal shapeshifters. The skyward trajectory of idiosyncratic Finnish extremists …and Oceans has been serpentine and sublime.
Since rising in 1995 from the ashes of death metal outfit Festerday, the group’s esoteric take on extreme music has seem them draw on a gamut on contrasting elements, ranging from black and death metal to classical, industrial and EBM, forever questing through various line-up changes, defying expectations while remaining wholly true to themselves.
“We’ve never been tied to one particular genre,” explains founding member, guitarist Timo Kontio. “As a band, we are driven to explore, to traverse unfamiliar landscapes, while always preserving our core sound. It’s about striking a balance. There’s the constant need in this band for renewal and ambition, but never at a cost to our identity.”
The group’s earliest albums, The Dynamic Gallery of Thoughts (1998) and The Symmetry of I: The Circle of O (1999), combined bombastic synth-driven salvos, blisteringly raw guitars, piercing banshee shrieks and ornate gothic arrangements in eviscerating wrath-fuelled blasts, while several celestial passages and near-dungeon synth segues already demonstrated the band’s need to mix things up.
A more seismic shift came in the mutant forms of A.M.G.O.D. (2001) and Cypher (2002), which saw …and Oceans transmogrify into a crushing cybernetic colossus, bulldozing into dystopian anti-futures with batteries of scalding techno beats and chugging palm-muted malevolence.
Accompanied by frontman Kena Strömsholm’s android syntax, the band’s dark heart now pumped corrosive hydraulic fluids around digital membranes, its symphonic black metal supercharged by martial industrial rhythms and infectious melo-death grooves.
The metamorphosis intensified with an interim rebrand as …and Oceans disbanded and its members reassembled under the name Havoc Unit in 2005, a vehicle for further mechanised contagions and noise worship, issuing their sole full-length, h.IV+ (Hoarse Industrial Viremia), in 2008.
But throughout these detours the mournful essence of …and Oceans’ singular universe endured, gathered together by a lamenting thread, a dolefulness unique to the Finnish scene, borne emphatically in the impassioned guitars of Kontio and his axe-wielding brother-in-arms, Teemu Saari. “Melancholia is everywhere, it’s in all the music that I make, especially my lead work,” elaborates Kontio. “It’s a key factor, distinctive to the whole …and Oceans catalogue.”
The band’s insatiable thirst for reinvention would subsequently find sustenance in its 90s roots, recasting the symphonic pomp of the past in the ardent furnace of experience and experimentation. Reconvening under the …and Oceans banner in 2017, the resulting brace of albums – Cosmic World Mother (2020) and As in Gardens, So in Tombs (2023) – redefined the group once more with ornate epics brimful of deliciously grim Karelian melodies and the chimerical atmospheres of keyboardist Antti Simonen, while new vocalist Mathias Lillmåns, replacing the departing Strömsholm, reinforced ties to black metal’s second wave with his devastatingly toxic rasp.
Now, 30 years on from their auspicious birth, …and Oceans have unveiled their most accomplished statement yet. A flamboyant distillation of the group’s grand nocturnal art, The Regeneration Itinerary assimilates all their hopes, dreams and influences into an uncompromising document of ravenous intent, with inebriating stylistic hybrids such as ‘Inertiae’ and ‘The Form and the Formless’ seamlessly fusing the heady onrush of symphonic black metal to the bludgeoning pulse of Simonen’s trance-dance hypnosis.
“The new album can be seen as a synthesis of our entire back catalogue,” suggests Lillmåns. “But there are new levels of extremity, too, ones that we’ve never reached before. These songs simply demanded harsher vocals. The riffs commanded it, and who am I to disobey?”
“This is our most experimental album since our comeback,” states Kontio. “It might be considered a continuation of the music we made in the 90s, but the sound has ripened and developed as our individual tastes have broadened, our inspirations subconsciously feeding into the band’s sound, necessitating change. From the very start, this band has encouraged progression and growth.”
Representing an intrepid summation of …and Oceans’ extraordinary journey, their continuing evolution, The Regeneration Itinerary locates the band’s dramatic thaumaturgical blends within a conceptual framework of opposites (and opposition).
“The Regeneration Itinerary explores the interplay between darkness and light, chaos and order, spiritual and material realms, with each song embodying an experience for the mind and body, navigating a passage to the present moment,” explains Lillmåns.
“The album works like a guide,” he continues. “Teaching us that not everything can be defined as simply being ‘good’ or ‘bad’, ‘light’ or ‘dark’, ‘copper’ or mercury’, underscoring the perpetual dance of dualities in the human experience.”
Line-up
Mathias Lillmåns – Vocals
Teemu Saari – Guitar
Timo Kontio – Guitar
Pyry Hanski – Bass
Antti Simonen – Keyboards
Kauko Kuusisalo – Drums
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