Back in 2018, a good 40 years into his musical career, Nick Cave made the leap from perennial theater attraction to arena-rock act. And while his promoters at AEG admitted at the time they were rolling the dice, the move was a key part of a masterplan to position Cave as the last alt-rock icon standing, filling the void left by Leonard Cohen, David Bowie, and Lou Reed. It was a lofty goal, to be sure, but in hindsight, they were actually selling Cave short: He’s really become something more like the goth Oprah. For Cave, music is just one part of a robust multimedia enterprise that spans books, films, speaking engagements, life coaching, and—the ultimate mark of personal-brand proliferation—his own homewares line. These days, Cave exists in an orbit of celebrity that would’ve seemed unfathomable even back when he was duetting with Kylie Minogue and writing screenplays for Guy Pearce flicks. There he is attending King Charles’ coronation. There he is taking songwriting tips from his pal Chris Martin. There he is gently grooving to “Glory Days” in the VIP section at a Springsteen concert alongside Chris Rock, Lars Ulrich, and Sting. At this point, Cave has become the rare musician who gets invited onto Colbert not to perform, but to sit on the couch and chat at length with the host.
Cave hasn’t achieved this new stratum of fame by making his music more accessible—in fact, his body of work since 2013’s transitional Push the Sky Away encompasses the most unconventional, anti-rock gestures of his career, effectively transforming the Bad Seeds from his fearsome backing band to his impressionistic backdrop. Rather, Cave has broadened his reach by making himself more emotionally accessible. Since losing his teenage son Arthur to a tragic accident in 2015, Cave has transformed the process of grieving into a sort of ongoing interactive art project, guided by his candor and generosity of spirit. In his Red Hand Files newsletter, he counsels fans through their own hours of need; in concert, the once confrontational frontman now spends much of his time roaming through the audience or inviting them onstage, literally reaching out to his parishioners to elicit moments of physical connection and communal catharsis. But if Cave’s past decade has presented us with two parallel narratives—the crowd-pleasing showman vs. the tireless experimentalist—with Wild God, he conjures their point of intersection.
Cave was originally going to title his 18th album with the Bad Seeds Joy, to reflect the more optimistic energy he was chasing after 2016’s bruised and brittle Skeleton Tree (recorded, if not written, in the immediate aftermath of Arthur’s death) and 2019’s otherworldly Ghosteen (whose ambient synth soliloquies were conceived as a means to communicate with his late son). But Cave ultimately decided that title would be too misleading. The shadow of death is no less pronounced on Wild God—since Ghosteen, Cave has unfathomably endured the death of a second son, Jethro, as well as the passing of former girlfriend/collaborator Anita Lane. But the way in which Cave processes his grief has changed, with the dream-state seance of Ghosteen replaced by morning-after reflection and a renewed appreciation for the staggering, at times irrational beauty of the world.
Where many veteran artists’ careers can be clearly demarcated by phases, or charted by peaks and valleys, Cave’s has been more like a perpetually rolling snowball that now resembles an avalanche. His writing on Wild God is a hodgepodge accumulation of myriad obsessions and experiences: The Biblical bloodlust and wounded romanticism of old is now fully enmeshed with his more recent predilection for hazy-headed storytelling and random celebrity name-drops. (Miley Cyrus, say hello to Kris Kristofferson.) Likewise, the Bad Seeds have emerged from the fog of Ghosteen a changed band—while Wild God goes a long way toward reinstating their imposing sense of grandeur and groove (complemented here by Radiohead bassist Colin Greenwood), the band now occupies a more celestial realm, embracing a style of symphonic space rock that evokes the alternately thrilling and terrifying sensation of sitting in an airplane as it lifts off the tarmac.
Wild God was produced by Cave and his trusty multi-instrumentalist foil Warren Ellis, but they handed mixing duties over to Flaming Lips/Mercury Rev studio wiz Dave Fridmann. His cosmic console touch can be felt the instant the opening “Song of the Lake” appears in a confetti-cannon burst of choral vocals, wintry orchestration, and vibraphone chimes, as if this were the Bad Seeds’ very own Soft Bulletin. And surely it’s no coincidence that Wild God’s titanic title track namechecks “Jubilee Street,” the slow-burning Push the Sky Away centerpiece that swiftly became the transcendental highlight of every Bad Seeds concert. But “Wild God” is ultimately less an explicit sequel to “Jubilee Street” than an attempt to outdo it in the showstopper-sweepstakes department, summoning the gale-force voices of the Double R Collective choir for its cataclysmic climax.
Wild God doesn’t so much capture Nick Cave fronting the Bad Seeds as losing himself within them. In accordance with the humbled soul we now see in interviews and online correspondence, Cave sounds absolutely in awe of the majestic sounds swirling around him. Forty years ago, he might’ve used the Cain-and-Abel parable and ominous storm-cloud imagery of “Frogs” as fodder for an apocalyptic blues-punk epic; here, they fuel a stargazing psychedelic-gospel odyssey that imagines Bowie covering “Nights in White Satin” for Blackstar. As the rain comes crashing down, Cave marvels at the toads jumping for joy in the gutter, and it’s easy to see why he’s so enamored with them: Much like the little froggies who’ve been reenergized by the downpour, Cave’s recent history has shown that even the darkest moments in life can have galvanizing effects. Wild God’s stirring centerpiece, the aptly titled “Conversion,” documents that process in real time: What begins as a doomy piano hymn erupts into a rousing church procession, with Cave practically speaking in tongues as he gets swept away by the choir. You just know that when he performs this live, he’ll be running up and down the aisles with arms outstretched, shouting “You’re beautiful!” in the face of every last attendee.
But while these songs present rapture as an out-of-body-experience, they’re answered by equally arresting moments of Cave crashing back down to Earth and being forced to reckon with the cruel hand he’s been dealt, as if he were submitting a soul-searching Red Hand Files inquiry to himself. “I told my friends that life was good/That love would endure if it could,” he sings on the exquisite “Cinnamon Horses.” But the combination of Cave’s crestfallen tone and the song’s funereal atmosphere suggests there are moments he can’t so easily embrace his own life-affirming advice, and that the brave face he presents to the world is undergirded by intense self-doubt and sadness. And while the song that could’ve been this record’s title track, “Joy,” contains Wild God’s most readily quotable slogan—“We’ve all had too much sorrow, now is the time for joy”—the song itself never indulges that impulse in obviously ecstatic fashion. Singing an improvised first take over a somber piano blues, Cave recounts a late-night visit with the ghost of a teenage boy, his spectral aura manifest in the waves of wordless vocals wafting through the piece. In contrast to the suggestive emotional cue of its title, the overall effect of “Joy” is as haunted as it is healing, a musical expression of that uncanny feeling that overcomes you when you wake from a vivid dream about a dearly departed loved one.
If the supernatural premise of “Joy” blurs the line between fact and fantasia, then the bittersweet “O Wow O Wow (How Wonderful She Is)” represents a more clear-eyed communion with the afterlife. The song is Wild God’s greatest outlier, and not just because of the programmed shuffle beats and Auto-Tuned smears. On an album that otherwise overwhelms you with IMAX-sized visions of dramatic weather events, untamed amphibians, and ghost teens, “O Wow O Wow” is Cave’s simple, sentimental tribute to a wild god who walked among us: Anita Lane, with whom Cave was creatively and romantically entwined at the dawn of the Bad Seeds. As elegies go, the song is surprisingly buoyant and even a little playful, thanks in large part to Lane herself, who turns up partway through in the form of a recorded phone conversation where she lovingly and laughingly reminisces about her early exploits with Cave, like a faded Polaroid that has flashed wondrously to life.
At the start of the album, “Song of the Lake” sets the emotional tenor for Wild God with a line pulled straight from “Humpty Dumpty”: “All the king’s horses and all the king’s men/Couldn’t put us back together again,” Cave sings, and suddenly a nursery rhyme we’ve heard a thousand times takes on a whole new uncomfortable meaning, coming from a man who’s experienced a series of life-altering losses. Toward the album’s end, “O Wow O Wow” seems to provide a response: The pain of feeling broken is ultimately an affirmation that our late loved ones still live on within us. The day the hurting stops is the day they’re truly dead. Wild God reminds us that joy and sorrow aren’t mutually exclusive states, they’re more like adjoining rooms in a house; both the darkness and the light still bleed through the cracks in the doorway. Joy isn’t merely happiness felt, it’s happiness earned, and Wild God is a remarkable portrait of a man putting in the work required to cross the threshold.
