End, the enigmatic 2023 album by Explosions in the Sky, was inspired by darkness, but became a loud, dramatic, wild rumination on life and death. "Our starting point was the concept of an ending-death, or the end of a friendship or relationship. Every song comes from a story, or an idea one of us has had that we've all expanded on and made it's own world. Maybe it's our nature, but we kept feeling that the album title was ultimately open to a lot more interpretation-the end of a thing or a time can mean a stop, but it can also mean a beginning, and what happens after one thing ends might pale in comparison to what it becomes next," says the band about the album. End is perhaps the "grandest" Explosions In The Sky album - melding the quiet restraint and crushing feel of their early releases with the sonic texturing and ornate experimentation of their later releases, and their increasingly deep film and television scoring catalog, influenced by personal tastes stretching from classical to soul to experimental ambient music.