Songfacts®:

• The final track on the 2018 Ash album Islands, "Incoming Waves" finds lead singer Tim Wheeler in a reflective mood. After a rough breakup, he did a lot of traveling to clear his head and write songs for the album. This one he wrote in the village of Deià in Mallorca, Spain, a creatively fecund place where he was alone with his thoughts.
  
  Wheeler was indeed watching the incoming waves when he wrote it, drawing inspiration at sunset when the sun lowered in the west, toward his home in New York City.
• In a Songfacts interview with Tim Wheeler, he explained: "It started with that keyboard motif that runs through the whole thing, and then I just made a loop of that keyboard line and started throwing chords underneath it. Eventually, I found a really nice little sequence.
  
  I was listening to a lot of Sigur Rós at the time, and I liked how they would have a keyboard motif going - I figured out it would repeat through the whole thing. I was trying to do something similar to them. And then the chords came under and they were quite nice."
• The poet Robert Graves is buried in Deià, which gives the opening line, "Great day for walking among the graves," a double meaning.