This album is really quite special to me because of when I listened to it during a family trip I went on. The first night in our Airbnb was hard for me. The house really was quite nice, but I felt like I didn’t actually want to be there. Although I had listened to this album before, only Oblivion had stuck out to me until this point. But on the car ride there and the night when I was staying in my room I listened to this album, and specifically this song, which ended up in my top 3 favorite songs I found in 2023.

On its own, this song is amazing, but in the context of the album it’s even better, the perfect closer to Mastodon’s best record. The slow sections truly feel ethereal: The long notes sung with harmonizing backup vocals, the perfect guitar tones (note specifically the intro and 9:22 — the acoustic guitar coming back in is absolutely my favorite moment on perhaps the entire album). But not to neglect the middle section of the song, which is the true meat of it. Brann Dailor has his typical drumming style here packed to the brim with fills, while Troy Sanders and Brent Hinds’s vocals are complimented by the beautiful guitar solos. This album represents the element æther (or quintessence, if we’re going by the track titles), and Mastodon was able to capture that beautifully.