Opening Sleep Token's fourth album, Even In Arcadia, "Look To Windward" emerges slowly and dramatically. It builds over eight cinematic minutes, creating a swelling atmosphere and an existential ache, like Pink Floyd by way of Dante's Inferno. Throughout the song, Sleep Token frontman Vessel wrestles with themes of inner collapse, cosmic isolation, and a yearning for salvation.

Vessel borrowed the title from a line in T.S. Eliot's famously bleak 1922 poem "The Waste Land" where Eliot urges us to pause our spinning wheels and reflect on the transience of power and beauty: O you who turn the wheel and look to windward, Consider Phlebas, who was once handsome and tall as you This is Eliot at his most softly brutal: a reminder that even the handsome and tall end up drowned and forgotten. Like Eliot, Vessel is preoccupied with memory, ruin, and the cruel passage of time.

Whether Vessel lifted the title straight from "The Waste Land" or from Iain M. Banks's 2000 sci-fi novel also titled Look To Winward (which itself borrowed from Eliot's poem), the effect is the same: literary depth, with a sci-fi shimmer.