Out of the Deep, though not published until 1771 in Alcock's Six and Twenty Select Anthems, bears a much earlier date of composition: 1732, the year of his appointment to St Laurence's Church, Reading. Alcock casts the work in a tripartite structure, which had been in vogue since the Restoration. Like Purcell's O Lord God of hosts and Croft's God is gone up, the two major portions of full choral writing are relieved by an intervening verse passage (SAT). It is typical of his church music (reflecting the wider early eighteenth-century style) and marries undoubted technical competence with a dignity and austerity appropriate for the penitential text of Psalm 130.