PPerhaps the most telling moment on Wild God comes about fifteen minutes in. A track called “Joy” begins in a manner characteristic of Nick Cave’s more recent songs: in a driving, winding style, beatless and detached from the usual verse-chorus structure he and key collaborator Warren Ellis began experimenting with on 2013’s Push the Sky Away. That style informed the extraordinary sequence of albums that followed: 2016’s harrowing Skeleton Tree, 2019’s exploration of loss, grief and redemption on Ghosteen, and 2021’s lockdown-inflected Carnage. Now, on Joy, synthesized tones float and shimmer as Cave strikes a melancholy series of chords on the piano, accompanied by what sounds like a roaring French horn. He sings about waking up in the night and being haunted by a voice that turns out to be “a ghost in giant sneakers, laughing, stars around his head… a boy on fire.”
The obvious assumption is that Cave is being visited by his late son Arthur, whose death in a 2015 slip-and-fall accident – and Cave’s reaction to it – shaped much of his subsequent work. Not just music, but also the 2019 Q&A tour “Conversations With Nick Cave,” “Faith, Hope and Carnage,” the extensive interview with Sean O’Hagan that was published as an acclaimed book in 2022, and “The Red Hand Files,” the online newsletter in which, as The New Yorker’s Amanda Petrusich so beautifully put it, he frequently “acts as an unexpected Virgil for anyone mired in grief looking for a warm but unsentimental guide.”
This time, however, the spirit brings a message: “We’ve all had too much sorrow, now is the time for joy.” As if on cue, the mood shifts, a chorus of warm, wordless voices rings out and the French horn soars to the sky. The song ends with Cave reflecting on the chaos and anger of life in 2024 – “All over the world they’re screaming their angry words about the end of love” – but still reaching for optimism: “The stars are above the earth, shining, triumphant metaphors of love.”
Joy feels like the mood of Wild God in miniature. The album’s songs aren’t sparing with gloom—pain, suffering and death all feature, including the death of Cave’s former collaborator and partner Anita Lane—but they suggest that life can still offer transcendent euphoria despite it all. The song about Lane is called O Wow O Wow (How Wonderful She Is): gloriously melodic, adorned with abstract vocoder smears and a phone recording of Lane giggling as she recalls her debauched past, it’s more about reverie than grief. On Frogs, Cave is walking home from church and stops to look at a frog in the gutter: “He’s leaping to God, amazed at love, amazed at pain, amazed to be back in the water.” Even if he doesn’t get very far, the song seems to suggest, that’s not the point: it’s about leaping further.
The music follows suit. Cave has reunited the Bad Seeds – who had seemed a little redundant amid Ghosteen’s beatless drifts, and weren’t featured at all on Carnage, an album credited to Cave and Ellis alone. Wild God deftly combines the meditative, flowing sound of its immediate predecessors with the band’s trademark power (one of the enduring mysteries of Cave’s career is how a band that has seen some 23 different musicians pass through its ranks over the years still always sounds like the Bad Seeds). The result is a set of songs that feel simultaneously airy and teeming, not least with a surfeit of blistering melodies. They frequently erupt into huge, ecstatic exhalations – there’s a fantastic moment towards the end of Song of the Lake where Thomas Wydler’s drums, which have previously been driving things along at a majestic, measured pace, suddenly erupt into a series of joyous, clattering swirls. Or the mood changes completely: “Conversion” sounds ghostly and barren at first, before it comes to life in the middle of a mass of singing and chanting voices, with Cave’s improvised singing sounding more and more ecstatic over it.
The title track is similarly upbeat, if lyrically ambiguous. It could be read as a sarcastic self-portrait of rock’s former prince of darkness in his late 60s (“It was rape and pillage in the old people’s home”), grappling with the dramatic shift in perception Cave has undergone in the past decade as it builds to an explosive, cathartic climax backed by choir and orchestra. Said climax seems to reinforce his belief in the transformative power of music and community: “When you’re feeling lonely and down and you just don’t know what to do,” he exclaims, “then put your mind down!”
If the song does indeed convey the message, the whole album reinforces that point. It is packed with remarkable songs and its mood, which could be described as radical optimism, is powerful and infectious. You leave the album feeling better than you did before: an enriching experience in the best sense of the word.
Wild God will be released on August 30th
This week Alexis heard
Kyrylo Stetsenko – Play, the violin, play
The label Light in the Attic’s latest foray into the obscure corners of music – this time from the Ukrainian underground of the 70s and 80s – produces gold: a joyfully offbeat crossover of disco, funk and rock.
