"(Untitled V)" inadvertently ended up being a kind of love-letter to 90s rock. The intro riff was something that our new guitar player, Eric, came up with at home and then emailed to everyone. It had a dirgy Soundgarden quality to it that everyone liked, and we had actually covered a Soundgarden song ("4th of July") a few years before. As we worked on it, the song developed a weird alternating major/minor tonality that reminded everyone of Nine Inch Nails' The Fragile.

In the studio, we just threw in any and every ridiculous stunt we could think of. The song sprouted a bunch of unruly improvised guitar noise and barbershop quartet vocals and became something else entirely. We knew it would piss off some of our longtime fans, but it was just one of the most fun-to-play things we've written. Harmonically, it's new territory for the band, but still feels familiar because of how it harks back to the music that we loved when we were kids, just picking up guitars for the first time. It has an exuberance to it that's new for us.

It also spawned one of the more memorable lyrical motifs on Quintessential Ephemera, the repeating choral line "made out of nothing..." which in many ways encapsulates what the whole record is about. There's a lot of meditation on how transient and empty our digital lives are, how we spend all this time sculpting and curating online identities that have no basis in reality, and how we consume so much online media that we end up totally inert and never excited by anything. Eric originally wrote the line as "I came to find basically nothing," but during the demo process, Matt kept incorrectly singing "made out of nothing" over and over. Eventually, we liked the 'wrong' version enough that we kept the line in the song, and had everyone sing it together as a 3-part harmony. Because we could.