The Ultracheese

The album's final breath, and it earns that position completely. Where much of Tranquility Base Hotel + Casino maintains an ironic distance, this song quietly removes the armour and just stands there. The arrangement is stripped to the bone — piano, a barely-there drum suggestion, and some of the warmest guitar tones Turner has ever permitted himself. It has a faint country looseness, a willingness to be unhurried that feels almost unprecedented in the band's catalog. The vocal is extraordinary: tender, slightly ragged at the edges, the voice of someone saying something true after a long time performing. The song is about endurance in love — not the electric early phase but the quieter, stranger commitment of staying, of choosing someone repeatedly across time. That subject matter sits in interesting tension with the album's themes of alienation and spectacle, making this feel like the moment the mask finally slips. It arrives at the end of the record like a window opening in a sealed room. The phrase "ultracheese" in the title is a kind of preemptive self-deprecation, Turner undercutting his own sincerity before anyone else can — but the music doesn't honour the joke; it's genuinely, nakedly moving. You listen to this at the end of something or the beginning of something else, in the small hours, when sentiment stops being embarrassing and just becomes honest.