Perhaps the most telling moment on Wild God comes about a quarter of an hour in. A track called Joy opens in a manner characteristic of Nick Cave’s recent songs: the kind of drifting, serpentine style, beatless and uncoupled from standard verse-chorus structure, that he and chief collaborator Warren Ellis began experimenting with on 2013’s Push the Sky Away. That style came to power the extraordinary sequence of albums that followed: 2016’s harrowing Skeleton Tree; the exploration of loss, grief and redemption that was 2019’s Ghosteen; 2021’s lockdown-mired Carnage. Now, on Joy, synthesised tones hover and shimmer as Cave strikes a melancholy series of chords on the piano, alongside what sounds like a lowing french horn. He sings of waking in the night, haunted by a voice that turns out to belong to “a ghost in giant sneakers, laughing, stars around his head … a flaming boy”.
The obvious assumption to make is that Cave is being visited by his late son, Arthur, whose death in an accidental fall in 2015 – and Cave’s response to it – has informed vast tranches of his subsequent output. Not just music, but 2019’s Q&A format Conversations With Nick Cave tour; Faith, Hope and Carnage, the extended interview with Sean O’Hagan published as an acclaimed book in 2022; and The Red Hand Files, the online newsletter where, as the New Yorker’s Amanda Petrusich beautifully put it, he frequently acts as “an unexpected Virgil for anyone mired in grief and casting about for a warm but unsentimental guide”.
This time, however, the ghost comes bearing a message: “We’ve all had too much sorrow, now is the time for joy.” On cue, the mood shifts, a chorus of warm, wordless voices appears and the french horn ascends skywards. The song ends with Cave contemplating the chaos and fury of life in 2024 – “All across the world, they shout out their angry words about the end of love” – but striving for optimism nonetheless: “The stars stand above the Earth, bright triumphant metaphors of love.”
Joy feels like Wild God’s mood in miniature. The album’s songs don’t stint on darkness – pain, suffering and death all feature, including the passing of Cave’s former collaborator and partner Anita Lane – but suggest that life can still provide transcendent euphoria despite it all. The song about Lane is called O Wow O Wow (How Wonderful She Is): it’s gorgeously melodic, decorated with abstract smears of vocoder and a telephone recording of Lane giggling as she recalls their dissolute past, and deals in reverie rather than mourning. On Frogs, Cave walks home from church, pausing to look at a frog in the gutter: “leaping to God, amazed of love, amazed of pain, amazed to be back in the water again.” Even if it doesn’t get far, the song seems to suggest, that’s not the point: the point is to keep leaping.
The music follows suit. Cave has reconvened the Bad Seeds – who seemed a little surplus to requirements among Ghosteen’s beatless drifts and who didn’t appear at all on Carnage, an album credited to Cave and Ellis alone. Wild God deftly melds the meditative, flowing sound of its immediate predecessors with the band’s trademark muscularity (one of the enduring mysteries of Cave’s career is how a band that’s seen something like 23 different musicians pass through its ranks over the years, always sounds like the Bad Seeds regardless). The result is a set of songs that feel simultaneously airy and teeming, not least with a preponderance of glowing melodies. They frequently surge into vast, ecstatic exhalations – there’s a fantastic moment near the end of Song of the Lake, where Thomas Wydler’s drums, which have previously moved things along at a stately, measured pace, suddenly burst into a series of gleeful, clattering rolls. Or the mood flips completely: Conversion initially sounds haunted and stark, before exploding into life midway through in a mass of voices singing and chanting, Cave’s extemporised vocal sounding increasingly rapturous over the top.
The title track, meanwhile, is similarly joyful, although lyrically oblique. One way you could read it is as a sardonic self-portrait, rock’s former Prince of Darkness in his late 60s (“It was rape and pillage in the retirement village”), grappling with the dramatic shift in perception that Cave has undergone over the last decade as it builds to an explosive, cathartic climax, bolstered by choir and orchestra. Said climax seems to reaffirm his faith in the transformative power of music and communality: “If you’re feeling lonely and if you’re feeling blue, and if you just don’t know what to do,” he cries, “bring your spirit down!”
If that’s indeed what that song is saying, the point is underlined by the album as a whole. Packed with remarkable songs, its mood of what you might call radical optimism is potent and contagious. You leave it feeling better than you did previously: an improving experience, in the best sense of the phrase.
• Wild God is released on 30 August
This week Alexis listened to
Kyrylo Stetsenko – Play, the Violin, Play
The Light in the Attic label’s latest dive into obscure corners of music – this time from Ukraine’s 70s and 80s underground – yields gold: this is a joyously off-beam disco/funk/rock crossover.
