Ancient Rome

There's a slow, imperial decay running through this track — a heavy, murky guitar riff that moves like something dragging itself through heat and dust. The tempo is deliberate, almost processional, and the rhythm section locks into a groove that feels less like momentum and more like inevitability. Cuomo's voice here drops the sneer of their earlier work and leans into something more theatrical, a kind of detached grandiosity that suits the song's theme of excess and collapse. The production is denser than their garage-era recordings, with layers of distortion that blur the edges of each instrument into a single smeared texture. Thematically the song invokes decadence and the rot that lives inside it — the image of a civilization indulging itself to ruin is worn lightly but present throughout. It sits in the psychedelic-adjacent space that some garage bands drift toward when they start listening to more Velvet Underground than Ramones. The arrangement builds without resolution, which is its own kind of statement. You'd reach for this at the end of a party that lasted too long, when the room has thinned out and the ashtray is full and nobody wants to be the first one to call it.