Its songs are sequenced together and characterized by what music journalists noted to be ghostly vocal production, irregular drum beats, pulsating percussive textures, trembling basslines, trilled synthesizers, and fluctuating samples.

[16] He imagined himself astral projecting when conceiving the album and tried to translate ideas from fiction he had read into music, including holographic universes, metaphysics, New Age philosophy, and astrodynamics.

Flying Lotus started working on Until the Quiet Comes at his home in Mount Washington, Los Angeles,[12][19] which featured more acoustic space than his previous residence in Echo Park.

[6] The song "Hunger" developed from a demo he had recorded for the soundtrack to one of the Twilight films, and "Sultan's Request" was performed live by Flying Lotus for three years before the album.

[26] Rather than emphasize conventional song structure elements such as hooks and choruses, Flying Lotus composed instrumentals that he found to be more intellectual and less danceable than Cosmogramma and treated them as the basis of tracks when recording the album.

"[4] Flying Lotus enlisted other vocalists, including Thom Yorke on "Electric Candyman", Laura Darlington on "Phantasm", Erykah Badu on "See Thru to U", and Thundercat on "DMT Song".

Tracks shudder to a halt midway through their development only to return as mutated shadows of their former selves and continually jarring juxtapositions of disparate stylistic features punctuate the album's progression.

[8] Its complex, diverse soundscapes deviate from popular music song forms and employ contrast and improvisational adjustments in mood, structure, and time signature.

[33] Songs on the album incorporate ghostly vocal production,[31] winding basslines,[33] uptempo drum-and-bass fills,[35] broad orchestral elements, pulsating percussive textures, bright keyboards, trilled synthesizers, and fluctuating samples.

[9] Joe Tacopino of Rolling Stone views that the album's guest vocalists "float into [Flying Lotus's] realm like visitors, just as fragile and malleable as the other elements he employs.

"[16] Fellow music journalist Vincent Pollard comments that most of the vocals are "used as subtle textures" and observes Flying Lotus "employing more organic tropes in his digital mix".

[20] The songs also exhibits Flying Lotus' characteristic mix of skittering, muffled percussion atop slightly irregular drum beats, accompanied by Thundercat's trembling basslines.

"[40] Jonny Ensall of Time Out views the album as "a digital jazz record which pushes hip hop beats and R&B melodies into bold, new syncopated and atonal territory.

[22] Uncut finds it "often reminiscent of his auntie's work",[41] while Consequence of Sound's Derek Staples perceives a "free jazz aesthetic" similar to "his great-uncle John Coltrane's Ascension", viewing both albums as "exercise[s] in dense rhythmic layers and melodic dissonance.

[9] Rory Gibb from The Quietus wrote that the narrative on this album veered into "the corridors" of Flying Lotus' "own mind", interpreting his guest vocalists as "disembodied phantoms, reanimated figments of his imagination stripped of agency and directed to their roles by [his] subconscious.

"[46] Gibb argued that Until the Quiet Comes was "an important and significant album" partly for engaging with "grand narratives" such as "the shifting identities of both humans and electronic music forms in a digital age", and "the internet's erosion of memory processes".

[46] Reef Younis of Clash perceived an emotional context to the album, writing that, "where [Flying Lotus] grieved on Cosmogramma, he believes on Until The Quiet Comes and there's a burgeoning sense of hope and coherence and optimism".

[35] The song begins with a skeletal, irregular rhythm, comprising a digital wood block, snare drum, and hissing cymbals, that is subsequently contrasted by Thundercat's harmonic bass runs.

[37] "Sultan's Request" has a square wave bassline,[48] tense synthesizers, and transitioning pitches and textures, spanning from a low-end drop to an upper register of high-pitched samples and steady hand claps.

[30] "Electric Candyman" has a dreamy R&B style and features distant, cooing vocals by Thom Yorke, a rattling drum sample, ghostly drones,[9] and anthropoid shrieks.

[5] On September 17, Flying Lotus released a teaser video called Small Moments, in which previews of the album's songs were accompanied by mysterious, botanical imagery.

It was titled after the album and directed by Kahlil Joseph,[53] who shot it in 35 mm film at the Nickerson Gardens housing project in Watts, Los Angeles and incorporated three songs from the album—"See Thru to U", "Hunger", and "Getting There".

[57] The film received praise from critics, and its viral success led to Warp Records' decision to pitch it to a music video network; it was ultimately accepted and aired by MTV2.

[71] Reviewing for AllMusic, Andy Kellman said Flying Lotus "not only peels away layers from his sound but organizes his tracks into a gracefully flowing sequence" on what is "his most accessible and creative release yet.

"[30] Filter magazine's Kyle Lemmon found his musicianship deft and the songs invariably "vaporous and angelic or menacing and silhouetted",[73] and Thomas May from musicOMH praised both the difficult concept and its execution.

[74] Arnold Pan of PopMatters said that his amalgamated music was achieved with admirable ease and lucidity, as Flying Lotus "conducts a master class on both how to create flow as well as how to maintain it through an entire album.

[70] In Rolling Stone, Will Hermes applauded Flying Lotus' "taste for 21st-century soul jazz with swarming high-end displays", but said "it all adds up to something so captivating that vocal guests ... can get a little lost.

[72] Robert Christgau named the title track and "Sultan's Request" as highlights but was lukewarm about the jazz-inspired musical concept, saying that it "achieves the sopranos-and-tinkle phase of sophisticated aural pansensuality".

"[6] Reviewing his performance at Danforth Music Hall that month, Now journalist Kevin Ritchie observed a "resoundingly maximal aesthetic and sound" that was "way more bombastic EDM" than the album's "IDM abstraction".

"[78] Flying Lotus also worked with longtime collaborator Dr. Strangeloop to create collage-like imagery during the shows,[58] including geometric visuals synched to the performed music.