“It Was Never Meant to Be This Way,” which features the more repetitive aspects of krautrock. It depicts what RVNG Intl. described as a "melancholy chopstick piano figure" in an environment of ghostly-and-airy-sounding synthesizer loops. Coleman wrote that the first two songs serve as an introduction to the tribal land that the EP takes place in, as they "casually build towards something" and "noodle and meander without any vocals leading the charge." Coleman analyzes that a human voice is introduced on The River in "Upon the Hill" in the form of an "abstract backing vocal choir." The track consists of Popol Vuh-style electric guitars that, as he wrote, give both a "vaguely spiritual" and "dusty-leather-rock-friendly" groove to the track. Snare drums come in later on in the track to "scream[] at us that we’re marching somewhere," he analyzed. Coleman pinpoints "Frozen Forest" as the MacGuffin in the plot of The River. The ambient downtempo trip-hop song was analogized by Finlayson as someone driving through the woods after a snowstorm, which is represented using what he labeled as "chilly synths and glimmering repeating noises" that play over a set breakbeat-style drums and bass arpeggios. Finlayson compared its "cold feeling" to the works of Fever Ray, while Rauscher found its vibe and guitar pick sounds similar to "Teardrop" by English group Massive Attack. The title track, categorized by Rauscher as a "Tim-Hecker style white-noise freak-out," includes synthesized panpipes and sounds similar to those of a heavy amount of water harshly flowing. As the press release described, the title track "casts doomsday shadows before the best use of a master blaster drum attack since DJ Shadow’s “Stem / Long Stem”." The River closes with “Orage," which, as the press release analogized, "drifts on a bed of wreckage into an uncertain dusk." As Finlayson wrote, the song is a "vague nod to times and sounds past as wonderfully resolving synth lines circle patiently around each other." Despite these synth lines being electronically-produced, Finlayson noted their "strangely natural" feel, "like some sort of high pitch noise a thriving forest emits condensed into carefully executed tones." The track ends with rain sound effects as it fades out. As Coleman wrote, "the final two tracks wind us down either the way we came or as some sort of conduit, some bridge to the next release." Remixes Digital download editions of The River come with four remixes of