"Cold Earth" could be a reference to a book of the same name by Sarah Moss. In the book, a group of archaeologists visit a medieval dig site in Greenland. They become isolated as a plague pandemic sweeps across the planet, and communication with the outside world breaks down.
Narratively, this track follows the dying out of a civilisation as presented on Telepath. In sustaining the theme of cycles on the album, the following track, Transmisiones Ferox presents a collage of radio transmissions, perhaps from another new upstart civilisation, or even disparate clusters of survivors who only have radios to communicate with each other, mirroring the "aggressive" or "fierce" ("ferox") transmissions as presented in this track.
Samples / Lyrics
Sandison: "We're definitely vintage hardware freaks. We've always used older gear. Everything we use is decrepit. Our studio is full of wooden things covered with red LEDs. We'll go to great lengths to get hold of a specific instrument just to get a particular sound. For example, there's a sound in Cold Earth that is something like only one second of audio. It comes from an obscure old effect unit that cost us a lot of time and road miles to source, and it ended up being one second of audio on the record."[1]