"Sea Within a Sea" is the first single from UK band The Horrors

The Horrors

The Horrors are an English band from Southend on Sea, formed in 2005. Their debut Strange House, was released in 2007 and reached number thirty-seven on the UK Albums Chart, their second album Primary Colours was released in 2009 and peaked at number 25 in the UK...

' second album Primary Colours

Primary Colours (album)

Primary Colours is the second studio album by British post-punk revival band The Horrors. It was released in the US on 21 April 2009, and in the UK on 4 May 2009 by XL Recordings. The album charted on the UK Albums Chart at #25. According to aggregating website Metacritic, the record was met with...

. First released online on March 17, 2009 after a week-long countdown on the band's website, the song is notable for its nearly eight-minute length and for not featuring any definable chorus or refrain

Refrain

A refrain is the line or lines that are repeated in music or in verse; the "chorus" of a song...

. The track was produced by Geoff Barrow

Geoff Barrow

Geoffrey Paul Barrow is the producer, disc jockey, and instrumentalist for Portishead.Portishead—formed in 1991—was named after the small town near Bristol where Barrow grew up...

 of the English trip hop

Trip hop

Trip hop is a music genre consisting of downtempo electronic music which originated in the early 1990s in England, especially Bristol. Deriving from "post"-acid house, the term was first used by the British music media and press as a way to describe the more experimental variant of breakbeat which...

 band Portishead.

Within one week of its release, the track had clocked over 13,000 plays on the Horrors' MySpace

MySpace

Myspace is a social networking service owned by Specific Media LLC and pop star Justin Timberlake. Myspace launched in August 2003 and is headquartered in Beverly Hills, California. In August 2011, Myspace had 33.1 million unique U.S. visitors....

 page. The band allowed fans to download an MP3

MP3

MPEG-1 or MPEG-2 Audio Layer III, more commonly referred to as MP3, is a patented digital audio encoding format using a form of lossy data compression...

 of the track for free from their official website.

NME

NME

The New Musical Express is a popular music publication in the United Kingdom, published weekly since March 1952. It started as a music newspaper, and gradually moved toward a magazine format during the 1980s, changing from newsprint in 1998. It was the first British paper to include a singles...

magazine described the song as "an eight-minute Spacemen 3

Spacemen 3

Spacemen 3 were an English alternative rock band, formed in 1982 in Rugby, Warwickshire by Peter Kember and Jason Pierce. Their music was "colorfully mind-altering, but not in the sense of the acid rock of the '60s; instead, the band developed its own minimalistic psychedelia"...

-meets-Neu!

Neu!

Neu! was a German band formed by Klaus Dinger and Michael Rother after their split from Kraftwerk in the early 1970s...

 odyssey of ominous motorik rhythms, Faris' mournful incantations and an expanding starfield of synths." In October 2011, NME

NME

The New Musical Express is a popular music publication in the United Kingdom, published weekly since March 1952. It started as a music newspaper, and gradually moved toward a magazine format during the 1980s, changing from newsprint in 1998. It was the first British paper to include a singles...

placed it at number 101 on its list "150 Best Tracks of the Past 15 Years".

Video

The video for the single was directed by Douglas Hart

Douglas Hart

Douglas Hart is a British musician and music video director.-Biography:Hart was the first bassist and founding member of the Scottish band The Jesus and Mary Chain, and played with the group from 1984 to 1991...

, former bassist of Scottish rock band The Jesus and Mary Chain

The Jesus and Mary Chain

The Jesus and Mary Chain are a Scottish alternative rock band formed in East Kilbride, Glasgow in 1983. The band revolves around the songwriting partnership of brothers Jim and William Reid...

. It premiered on March 17, 2009 on the Horrors' official website.