In the War on Drugs’ music, you’re never quite sure where the road leads, but you have faith it’s safe to travel. Bandleader Adam Granduciel’s romantic, mysterious vision of America is at its most expansive on the 11-minute “Thinking of a Place.” It’s a slow, loping epic that takes familiar elements from Granduciel’s discography—gauzy synths, wheedling harmonica, a guitar solo that stumbles around the beat—and stretches them into unfamiliar positions. And like much of his work, it doesn’t tell a love story in any traditional sense. Instead, it approaches the idea of transcendence from multiple angles: Love is a ghost just beyond our grasp; lovers melt into each other entirely; and thinking of a place is enough to make it real. Meanwhile, melodies blur and stack like thin clouds on the horizon, and the knockout hook lands after you’ve long since passed into a meditative state. Granduciel once titled an album Lost in the Dream, and “Thinking of a Place” feels like the culmination of that idea: You can lose yourself in this song forever, moving through a twilight that never fades. –Jamieson Cox

Listen: The War on Drugs, “Thinking of a Place”