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Nick Cave to Embark on Rare North American Solo Tour This Fall

By Daniel Kreps

Daniel Kreps

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Nick Cave will embark on a rare North American solo tour this fall, with Radiohead’s Colin Greenwood accompanying him on bass.

Cave’s 18-date solo jaunt kicks off Sept. 19 in Asheville and hits theaters throughout the U.S. and Canada — including stops at Brooklyn’s Kings Theatre, New York City’s Beacon Theatre and Nashville’s Ryman Auditorium — before concluding with a two-night stand at Los Angeles’ Orpheum Theater on Oct. 27 and 28. Register for tickets to the solo tour now through Cave’s site .

Nick Cave – Live in North America 2023, register now for pre-sale access here: https://t.co/PgFrXaBPvI Pre-sale tickets go on sale on Monday, March 27 at 10am (local time). General on sale tickets go on sale Friday, March 31 at 10am (local time). pic.twitter.com/e5mHx8VWfv — Nick Cave & The Bad Seeds (@nickcave) March 23, 2023

The jaunt marks Cave’s first solo trek since his pre-Covid tour of Europe in Jan. 2020; since then, he’s either toured with his Bad Seeds or alongside longtime collaborator Warren Ellis.

Greenwood previously performed alongside Cave and Warren Ellis during that duo’s Australian tour in late 2022.

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Nick Cave Tour Dates

September 19, 2023 – Asheville, NC – Thomas Wolfe Auditorium September 21, 2023 – Durham, NC @ DPAC September 23, 2023 – Washington, D.C. @ Lincoln Theatre September 25, 2023 – Cleveland, OH @ Playhouse Square  September 27, 2023 – Milwaukee, WE @ Riverside Theater September 29, 2023 – Chicago, IL @ Auditorium Theatre October 2, 2023 – Minneapolis, MN @ State Theatre October 6, 2023 – Brooklyn, NY @ Kings Theatre October 7, 2023 – New York, NY @ Beacon Theatre October 10, 2023 – Boston, MA @ Wang Theatre October 12, 2023 – Montreal, QC @ Salle Wilfrid-Pelletier October 14, 2023 – Toronto, ON @ Massey Hall October 15, 2023 – Detroit, MI @ Masonic Cathedral Theatre October 17, 2023 – Nashville, TN @ Ryman Auditorium October 20, 2023 – Atlanta, GA @ Atlanta Symphony Hall October 22, 2023 – Dallas, TX @ Majestic Theatre October 23, 2023 – Austin, TX @ ACL at The Moody October 27, 2023 – Los Angeles, CA @ Orpheum Theatre October 28, 2023 – Los Angeles, CA @ Orpheum Theatre

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Nick Cave and the Bad Seeds: Ghosteen review – a heavenly haunting

(Ghosteen Ltd) In the first album wholly written since the death of his son, Cave reaches an extraordinary, sad and beautiful artistic evolution

W hat is the worst that can happen? And what happens after the worst does? Nick Cave, leader of the Bad Seeds, his band of over 30 years, has had to endure the triple bind of unimaginable tragedy, processing grief as a public figure and – more recently – the task of metabolising that suffering into some kind of continued artistic existence. Had Cave gone to ground indefinitely after the death of his teenage son Arthur in 2015 , everyone would have understood.

Instead, he released an album in 2016, Skeleton Tree – a work digested by fans in the shadow of the event, but largely written before it – and an accompanying documentary, the visually lyrical One More Time With Feeling , which dealt with the aftermath of Arthur’s passing.

Last year, Cave did two more barely imaginable things: he started an ask-me-anything online forum called the Red Hand Files where he candidly discussed his own state of mind and handed out sage advice like the most sublime of agony uncles. Then Cave took the whole process on tour, embarking on an extraordinary series of solo dates in which he mixed song with questions from the audience. That this formerly forbidding bard of lust and brimstone, violence and tenderness, was trading in his artistic aloofness for a purgative communion marked one of the most remarkable evolutions in rock. “Nothing can go wrong, because everything has gone wrong,” he noted in Cardiff .

Now there is Ghosteen , a double album about a wandering spirit in which Cave invokes the gravitas of the late Leonard Cohen and the hoarse, harsh beauty of latterday Scott Walker. You might have thought bereavement might have unleashed a raging, vengeful beast within Cave – there is a cougar on this album, prowling the perimeter of a California compound, “with a terrible engine of wrath for a heart”, but it is the sole irruption here of the old, Old Testament Cave.

Listening to these 11 songs requires a ready supply of absorbent materials, some rehydration salts – it is so very sad – and perhaps a metaphysician on call. Quite apart from the devastation in its recurrent themes – Jesus in his mother’s arms, blackened butterflies, stairways to heaven, a malevolent, Pied Piper-like sun that steals children away – Ghosteen is an album about the very nature of what is real and what is not, and who is to judge.

Bright Horses, one of the most beautiful songs here, sets loose metaphorical horses of love with “manes full of fire” into an apocalyptic landscape. But then Cave reins them back in.

“And we’re all so sick and tired of seeing things as they are,” he aches, “The horses are just horses and their manes aren’t full of fire, and the fields are just fields and there ain’t no Lord.”

Cave, though, feels the continued presence of his son, “a little white shape dancing at the end of the world”. Cave assures us he’s coming home “on the 5.30 train”. Why not believe in ghosts? “There’s nothing wrong with loving something you can’t hold in your hand,” Cave muses, on the title track. And Arthur’s analogue, the Ghosteen, appears from time to time, to say: “I am beside you.”

As to where we go when we die, this career-long purveyor of religious imagery doesn’t tackle that directly. “We are here, and you are where you are,” he puts it movingly, on a song called Fireflies, the first sign of this new album, its lyrics released via the Red Hand Files a year ago.

The album’s vivid cover art, meanwhile, is a kitsch paradise by the artist Tom du Bois in which flamingos frolic and lions lie down with lambs, signalling a radical change of emotional landscape for the Bad Seeds. And yet Ghosteen completes a trilogy of records connected by their sound: Push the Sky Away (2013), Skeleton Tree and Ghosteen are all keening, subliminally orchestral works, swirling with electronic mood music; they supersede the rock format and solo piano of previous Bad Seeds or Cave solo works, underscoring the cornerstone presence of violinist Warren Ellis, who also provides revelatory backing vocals.

It takes a moment to decipher Cave’s explanation that the songs on Part One are the children, and the songs on Part Two are their parents. These are not two sets of songs sung from generational points of view, but rather, Ghosteen ’s second half contains the seeds of its first: the songs of Part One may have been spun off from Part Two.

Ultimately, all are visions, alternately haunted and comforting. Subtle evolutions in mood and instrumentation come to peaks that are made all the more stunning by their scarcity. There are pianos, but the exhausted trope of the sad piano ballad is nowhere to be found. A luminous, Kraftwerk-like sheen distinguishes the title track itself; on Night Raid, a bell of sorts tolls. At its very climax, the catastrophic moment where a small child abandons his bucket and spade and “climbs into the sun”, the final track collapses in on itself, a pulsating, flickering black hole of electronic absence that is more astonishing than any cheap pile-on of violins.

Cave is still Cave, though. This rollercoaster ride comes bookended by two fables. Spinning Song takes an Elvis-like character and plants a tree in his garden: the launch of a suite of songs with all the force of myth, in which a flotilla of galleons sails into the predawn air and sea creatures are sprung from the deep. In among all this hallucinatory elegance sit everyday vignettes: listening to the radio in the kitchen, sitting in a car park.

At the end, Cave reprises the Buddhist tale of Kisa Gotami , a heartbroken mother combing each house in a village for a mustard seed with which to save her child, the Buddha’s proviso being that the seeds had to come from houses where there had not been a death.

She can’t find a single one. No one is untouched by loss. And this album finds Cave comforted by the universality of suffering, and the succour of those who gathered around him. “For we are not alone it seems, so many riders in the sky,” Cave observes on Galleon Ship. On Ghosteen Speaks, the spirit notes: “I think my friends have gathered here for me.”

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Nick Cave and the Bad Seeds review, ‘Ghosteen’: Cave sounds buoyed, not weakened, by exposing his wounds on this astonishing album

Following the traumatised chaos of 2016’s ‘skeleton tree’, ‘ghosteen’ is a warm cloud of ambient solace , article bookmarked.

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When Nick Cave ’s 15-year-old son, Arthur, died in July 2015, the Bad Seeds frontman said the idea of grieving in the public eye seemed “impossible”. His first instinct was to hide. But, by 2017, he came to understand that “the rush of emotion it unleashed in people and the way they wrote about their own sadnesses and their own griefs was monumental and amazingly helpful for me and my family… basically it saved us”.

Since then, Cave has opened the doors to his fans on his website and on tour: answering any question with startling directness and humanity. The former Dark Prophet of the Outback became a kind of mystic agony uncle: profound, tender and deeply connected.

When Joe, from Bexhill-On-Sea wrote in at the end of September to ask when we could expect a new album, the surprise reply was: next week, and it’s a double. The first is a series of eight shorter, simpler songs, which Cave has described as the “children”, and the second is two grander suites, or “parents”, separated by a spoken section.

Following the traumatised chaos of 2016’s Skeleton Tree, Ghosteen is a warm cloud of ambient solace – a sonic evocation of the communion he has experienced through his newly porous relationship with his audience. He sounds buoyed, not weakened, by exposing his wounds.

The 40 greatest song lyrics

His voice – still commanding in its depth of tone and purpose – levitates above the static hum of Warren Ellis’s analogue synths. Ghosteen doesn’t directly name Arthur, or even use words like “death” and “grief”, because it doesn’t need to. He’s “the little white shape dancing at the end of the hall,” “the wish that time can’t dissolve”.

I know Cave lost some fans in 2009 when Mick Harvey took leave from The Bad Seeds and Ellis became his main collaborator. But there’s a real magic in the frequencies they achieve with the hot wires and vintage wood of those machines. Opener “Spinnings” begins with slow, oscillating notes – like tuning in to a benign seance. Harmonics glow in the distance like the faintest of rainbows.

Synth inventor Bob Moog always said he thought there is a “spirituality” in the analogue waveform; that there is “a consciousness that we connect with” when playing them. This consciousness oscillates throughout Ghosteen , as Cave expresses his weariness with the limits of the material world. His piano bleeds into the synths in the next two songs. On “Bright Horses” – the first album’s most obviously gorgeous track – he sighs that: “We’re all so sick and tired of seeing things as they are/ Horses are just horses and their manes aren’t full of fire… And everyone is hidden and everyone is cruel/ There’s no shortage of tyrants and no shortage of fools.”

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There’s a choral layering of vocals on “Ghosteen Speaks”, in which the departed assures us: “I am beside you/ Look for me”. Though the sounds are soft, they are more hair-raising than Cave at his blood and spittle-spattered screamiest.

Ghosteen ’s second part is more of a grower. After the intimacy of the first album, the more grandiose sound and stretched structure dials down the intensity of the connection. But you build back up to that through “Leviathan” and suddenly you’re there in Cave’s living room. “Mama Bear holds the remote,” he sings. “Papa bear just floats/ Baby bear he has gone to the moon on a boat/ Oh on a boat…”

The sound puts your heart into zero gravity and you find yourself floating with Cave, in orbit around the wonder and agony of it all. As the suite draws to a close, the bereaved father tells us he is “just waiting for my time to come”. And after 65 minutes, The Seeds’ drummer Jim Sclavunos, picks up his sticks. The distant beat seems to come from another world. A quietly devastating way to end an astonishing record.

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Warren Ellis On The Past, Present, & Future Of Nick Cave & The Bad Seeds

Charlie Gray

In the nearly 40 years since From Her To Eternity , there have been many chapters for Nick Cave & The Bad Seeds. The band has mutated time and time again, with different aesthetics and voices coming to the fore. In the last 15 years or so, the direction has been partially shaped by Warren Ellis. Though Ellis was a full-time Bad Seed by the end of the ’90s, it was in the ’00s that he and Cave began working together more closely, and the result has been a striking late-career string of albums that at the very least rival the peaks of Bad Seeds history, and often times feel like the best work any of these people have done.

A line was conveniently drawn in 2005, when Cave released the first B-Sides And Rarities compilation, collecting loose ends from the first 20-odd years of the Bad Seeds’ existence. Around that same time, he and Ellis began scoring movies together, which started a process in which Ellis’ influence became more and more profound on Bad Seeds albums and Cave’s output overall. From the outside, it’s often seemed like a dream partnership. Cave’s apocalyptic shaman aged into a wiser, more empathetic character. Ellis was the bearded wild man guiding the band into unforeseen waters but also the musical wizard inching them towards a sound that was quieter, more challenging, and more adventurous all at once.

The two of them have been very prolific: If you look at the last 15 or so years, Cave and Ellis have churned out movie scores, Bad Seeds albums, Grinderman albums, almost all of it of impeccable quality. Earlier this year, the two put out their first non-score album as a duo, Carnage . That album was the product of lockdown — Cave and Ellis finding some time to get together and jam and catch up, then ending up with an album. But it wasn’t the only thing they were working on during the pandemic. Early on, Cave suggested they start compiling a new B-Sides And Rarities comp, and Ellis set forth digging through his hard drive; at the same time, they were working on a score for Andrew Dominik’s forthcoming Blonde . On the occasion of the new compilation, we caught up with Ellis, calling on Zoom from his home in Paris. The conversation began with the B-sides, but soon dove deep into Ellis’ life as a musician, different eras of the Bad Seeds, and the profound mark Ghosteen left on him. Read our conversation below.

The new compilation comes from a period of time during which you became a bigger driving force within the Bad Seeds, a closer collaborator with Nick. These are key years, in my mind, for the Bad Seeds in general — as they came into this later era sound. For you, having been along for the ride, were there any big surprises or revelations as you were going through this material?

WARREN ELLIS: I guess the surprises are mostly on the last disc, the outtakes and unreleased tracks. B-sides, you know of their existence. The surprise comes when you put them all together in a package. They can come from a certain period of time and they don’t find a home on the record, and when they’re all put together on a compilation it jumps all over the place. There’s something really wild and playful and beautiful about that. You know what’s basically there in the B-sides. You go through the vaults, you find these things. If you look at the first disc, from that Dig Lazarus Dig!!! era, I remember them. The surprises, for me, came in putting together the second album, the Skeleton Tree and Ghosteen stuff.

There weren’t any official B-sides released, as such. Anything that was done in those sessions is an outtake. That was interesting, going back through. I just have hours and hours and hours of stuff. The digital age has allowed that to happen. You used to have tapes, and that was it. With hard drives, you can do so much more. There was a lot of stuff I’d forgotten about from the Skeleton Tree sessions. It was such a particular experience, being in the studio with Nick. His son Arthur had just died. Going back through that, it was interesting to see how much stuff we actually did do. I remember working a lot. We worked a lot to try and elevate the demo versions of things we took in there. Ghosteen , there was only ever one track, “Earthlings.” It was a potential track for the record but I got cold feet mid-recording and said it’s not right for the record. Eventually we pulled “Ghosteen Speaks” out and started working on that one [instead]. “Earthlings” was the only [extra track from Ghosteen ] that was even finished.

Part of the process of working on, particularly, the last three Bad Seeds records, it’s just me and Nick going into the studio and improvising and trying to find initial ideas for demos. We don’t even go in there with songs. It was a development of an approach we were doing on scores for years, basically since 2005. I think around the time of West Of Memphis , when we did that score, that bled into Push The Sky Away . I had a synthesizer that had been waiting around. I bought that in Japan in the early ‘00s. I remember trying to get it on Grinderman and every time I tried to start up there was just this deafening silence or confusion. I didn’t know what I was doing with it either. When we did West Of Memphis , I just took that synthesizer to Nick’s house and he was like, “Where’s the violin?” I was like, “I’m not playing the violin, I’m playing this.” I didn’t know what I was going to do, but I just wanted to do something different. That bled into Push The Sky Away and for me signaled more of a move into electronic stuff more than ever.

The score work, we sit down and jam away and have hours and hours of stuff. Grinderman, around this time, we’d sit down and start playing the four of us. Long story short, it ends up there’s hours and hours of jamming, from absolute rubbish to moments that feel genuinely inspired. You keep playing through hours of nonsense and eventually something comes together. It’s a really general summation of the process, but it’s a bit how it’s been the last couple of records. You’ll hopefully find some incredible moments within this process. It becomes very meditative.

For Ghosteen , we did two four- or five-day sessions like that. It was literally hours and hours and hours. We run the recorder from 10 in the morning until we close the door basically. Sometimes it might be chopping out 30 seconds that’s interesting, or doesn’t feel familiar — it feels kind of terrifying and unknown. There’s lot of this stuff lying around, and from that stuff we pick out what might potentially become songs. I love these jams. They just get so ridiculous. There are some Nick and I can laugh about for a long time afterwards. During the lockdown, when there was this idea to put the B-sides together, I said I’d go through the hard drive and see what I could find. I knew there were songs that didn’t quite get finished. There were a lot of ideas with Ghosteen that had to be really whittled down to a two-album record. There were a lot for Skeleton Tree as well.

I think I put together about three hours worth of stuff, I made three playlists of things and sent them, Nick had a listen, and we whittled it down to one and I worked on them in the context of the lockdown. That’s all I could do. Sit at home and try to do some overdubs to try and get them into some shape. It felt like it was interesting, if we could, to represent the process, and these songs that almost got there but didn’t. Songs you wish had gotten there, but didn’t. It felt like a good addition to this. That was surprising to me.

Surprising, also, looking at those two records in particular… the Bad Seeds sound has always changed over the years. It’s what was always remarkable about the band. For someone like me, who arrived at the band as a fan, every record that came out, they just seemed to go somewhere you didn’t expect. You kind of recognized what it was, but it also felt like something new was going on. From Her To Eternity ? I couldn’t believe that record when I first heard it. It was familiar but so not familiar. It felt like a rock ‘n’ roll album, an old-style ‘50s rock ‘n’ roll, but then totally not like that. I think the Bad Seeds have always been looking to reinvent the sound, and at the same time find a sound that’s a vehicle for these songs. It’s always about the songs, you know.

I think the wonderful thing about the B-sides is, the whole thing together is its willingness to jump all over the place. It’s almost schizophrenic kind of. It’s interesting to also see a band that’s just fearless in terms of what it’s willing to stylistically embark upon. At times, it sounds like a strange guitar band and other times it’s god knows what. It’s poetry over sort of electronic concrete music or something. I find the B-sides a much more enjoyable listen than other records. A record, you’ve listened to so much in the mixing and mastering and producing of it. By the end of it, you have to have fallen out of love with it and let it go. The B-sides, it’s a whole bunch of mates you can actually hang out with. Sit and listen to them. They haven’t worn you down, in a way, by the process. They haven’t out-stayed their welcome.

Premature Evaluation: Nick Cave & Warren Ellis Carnage

One of the things that’s interesting to you hear you talk about is this focus on jamming. That was one thing I was hearing, in revisiting these eras by way of the compilation. The final days of a more rock-oriented Bad Seeds, with the Lazarus B-sides, and these later songs on the second disc — it’s really coaxing stuff out of the ether.

ELLIS: I think there’s a thing too that changed in Nick’s writing style. I never really discuss it with him or with anybody. Nick kind of just does his thing, that’s what he’s always done. But there definitely seems like a moment where he’s wanted to get away from writing… he’s great with structure, but there’s definitely a moment where he wanted to move away from that. The thing that holds you down with that is when you have a set of chords and a melody and it’s all locked in to that. When you’re coming with a song that’s written, the band has to work it out. If it’s a melody and chords, you have to work out what you think is the best thing for that song. But if you go in there and you’re improvising on the instruments, and then Nick just starts ad-libbing.

In these sessions, there’s sometimes 10 different versions of a lyric, where he’s trying to find a home for it in an improvisational jam. That can lead to something really extraordinary. It keeps you guessing. You’re looking for it in a way. There’s something about the repetition of something you’ve already thought on that gets tired really quickly in the studio. But when you’re unaware? Say a moment like the song “Magneto” on Skeleton Tree . I’d recorded the track, Nick walked in, heard 10 or 15 seconds of it, and said, “I think I got something for that.” What you’re hearing is Nick actually singing along to a piece where he doesn’t even know how it’s gonna go. There is something extraordinary about being in that moment. It requires a lot of trust with the people you’re working with. And to really not know what’s coming — but to try and land something. It requires, I think, a lot of years of working to get to a thing like that. I make it sounds kind of easy. But to have that trust and to be able to jump off like that, it requires you to have had a lot of structure and support in the past.

There was something else you said about arriving at the band as a fan. Let Love In was the first time you played with the Bad Seeds at all. Do you remember what it felt like to first be in that world?

ELLIS: I was called in to play a string part that Mick Harvey had written. I was probably one of the only violin players working in that world in Melbourne. Literally I’d been playing for a year or two or something. Particularly with Dirty Three, we’d established this name in a really marginal world. We had a following and people knew about us, but I don’t even know who thought of me [for Let Love In ]. I went in there to try and play a string part that I didn’t know how to play, because I hadn’t read notes for ages. That’s when I met Mick, who was really great with me. He sat with me — this is the days before Auto-Tune and stuff like that, so it was just take after take after take. Mick was incredibly kind. He could’ve just said, “Let’s get someone who can do it efficiently.” I was really high during this as well. [ Laughs ]

I met Nick so briefly [then]. It was a couple years later I met Nick over dinner and he asked me if I wanted to come in the studio next week. I said yeah, and I went in, and after that first evening, he said, “You want to come in for the rest of the week?” I guess that was how it happened. But how I felt about it? I was totally sort of blown out by the whole experience. These were people I really expected and looked up to. I would always go and see them live and listen to their records. They were giants. It was really overwhelming. I remember arriving and thinking, “Well, there’s two ways this can play out. I’m so overwhelmed that I can’t do anything and I’ll be asked to leave after five minutes, or I can go in and try to do what I do.” There were probably amphetamines involved and stuff too, some speedball to cool me down a bit. [ Laughs ] But yeah, I just thought they were one of the best bands in the world. I’d only been playing for really a couple years in bands. I’d done stuff with orchestras. But the thing I was doing, the electric violin, that was all relatively new.

Before that, you had a phase in the late ’80s where you were busking around Europe?

ELLIS: I lived in a bunch of places, and I was busking and stuff. It was like a nine-month trip, and then I came back and I took a job teaching at a school in the country. I’d had enough of working in kitchens. I used to wash dishes in a strip joint. I used to sell drugs. I’d do whatever I could to pay the rent. I took a job as a teacher and went down to a country town, because I’d had enough of cleaning toilets and cleaning night clubs. I had no designs on being a musician. I never thought I would be. I was purely a music listener. I loved music. I happened to play a couple of instruments, but they weren’t the instruments I listened to. I never thought it’d be a career move for me. I went down and taught for a while in a country town but realized it wasn’t a job I should be doing given the lifestyle choices I was making at the time. [ Laughs ]

So I moved back to the city in the early ’90s and started playing by accident, because a friend of mine remembered I played the violin and his friend had written some songs. My younger brother said, “You’ll need a pickup.” So he stuck a guitar pickup on [my violin] with a rubber band. I plugged it in that night and he was like, “Here’s a distortion pedal.” I found the sound by accident. I got an amplifier and very quickly met Jim [White] and Mick [Turner] and we formed Dirty Three. In a relatively short space of a couple months, I went from playing in one band to playing in about four or five bands. I was just in the right place at the right time with this weird approach to an instrument. I didn’t even know what it was. I just plugged it into a pedal, turned it up to 10. The louder and more out of control that it was, the better it felt for me.

Dirty Three was the thing where it all landed. I thank god every day that I met those two guys. It taught me so much about creating music, the creative process. Those two guys, the way they approach things — and the freedom that is still in that band. The fact that we had no vocals. I couldn’t have asked for a better environment. I wasn’t well-suited to being someone who sat there and played a little violin solo between two verses. That didn’t fall very well for me. All through the ’90s and even now, I’ve always been looking for my voice in music. I moved away from violin. It’s always there, but I moved into other things.

Last year, you were credited on the IDLES song “Grounds.” You were hanging out with them in the studio that day. What was it about that band that wanted to meet them?

ELLIS: Nick Launay was working with them, and I’d met them at a festival a few years before. I was eating a piece of blueberry pie and these two guys were sitting in the shadows. They kept looking at me and I thought, “Are they going to steal my pie?” One of them walked over and said, “Can we sit down with you?” And I was like, “Yeah,” and “Here it comes,” you know? I was hanging on to my pie for dear life. They introduced themselves and said they worked with Launay. I think they’d just put a record out at that time. They were really nice guys, it was really lovely to meet them.

When they went back in to do that record, Launay called me — it was where we did Skeleton Tree . He said, “You wanna come out? They’d love to play you some stuff.” I went out there, and they played me some stuff, and Joe [Talbot] said, “Would you like to be on a track?” I said, “Sure, what?” He was like, “You Australians are the only people who know how to say oi.” So me and Joe went out and did the oi that’s the centerpiece of that song. I got bloody stickered on the album for it. My son, he’s sort of always known what I do. But his mates were like, “That your dad on the IDLES album?” I think he suddenly thought I was cool for about two seconds. [ Laughs ]

Are there other younger artists you feel a kindred spirit with?

ELLIS: I don’t know if it’s about kindred spirit. I’m the wrong person to ask about music, what’s going on. So much of my time is spent making music. The discovery of music, for me, people have to show me it these days. I love the Divide And Dissolve record that came out, Gas Lit . I thought it was so fucking good. I really liked Lana Del Rey’s album, Chemtrails Over The Country Club . Talking recent records, I think that one is fantastic. I love about like, half of Kanye’s new record. I think it’s unbelievable. I always listen to Bill Callahan. He’s, I think, one of the best lyric writers around. I’ll always listen to Bill.

I have to be honest… I don’t know if I was ever really into young music, even when I was young. The young music, maybe, that was around me when I was young. In my late teens, I discovered Miles Davis and John Coltrane and stuff like that. I liked the Birthday Party and I liked the Saints and I liked AC/DC and I liked the Stooges. But I had a really big story with John Coltrane and Alice Coltrane. It was this stuff that, to me, seemed so far-reaching.

There’s a lot of music I think happened at pivotal moments in my life that I go back to a lot, because I love living the sensation I had with it. I think people making music is fantastic, but these days there’s just so much stuff coming out. I don’t seem to be able to absorb records into my life like I used to. I think you saturate yourself. For me, it was Low and Ziggy Stardust , that period of my life where I could listen to it over and over and over again. I mean, I love that Gil Scott-Heron album that came out about 10 years ago, I’m New Here . I think that’s an amazing album. I listen to a lot of score stuff. I like stuff without lyrics. I get distracted by the lyrics, and I like to multi-task. I also like I can go into instrumental music in a really different way. It’s an emotional thing.

In terms of the era the B-sides compilation covers: I was digging up videos of live performances of “Jubilee Street” recently. I was thinking about how, to me, that song and how it has evolved live has started to feel like a definitive statement — sonically, but also spiritually — for a certain chapter of the Bad Seeds. I was wondering how you felt about that song and how it developed, or if there are others that loom larger for you.

ELLIS: It’s funny with songs, because some only ever live on a record. Most of the time, we sit down and try every song on the album in the rehearsals and there’s some that will make it and some just won’t. Their life is to be on a record. They work in that moment but they somehow don’t translate to what you’re trying to do live, or they don’t find their way into the show. I think there’s always songs like that on a record. The Carnage tour , there were a couple we just couldn’t work out how to make them feel right live. Some songs, you think they’re going to work really well and they don’t. Some surprise you. It develops a new life through playing it live.

“Jubilee Street,” I certainly didn’t think it would be one of those big songs in the repertoire. I had the chords for that and I was saying to Nick, “Look at these chords.” We were doing West Of Memphis and he went, “Hey we should put it in this soundtrack,” and I went, “Mate, I think there’s something better for this, it’s a really cool set of chords.” Nick called me after that session, “I’m really glad you said we shouldn’t use it in there, I’ve just been sitting here playing it all day.” The song just grew from there. On the last couple tours, it became quite a centerpiece of the live show, with “The Mercy Seat” and “Stagger Lee” and things like that.

I remember when “Red Right Hand” came out. I was going to see the Bad Seeds when that came out. If you told me that Peaky Blinders was going to use that and — you know, it’s now probably the most well-known Bad Seeds song. Everybody goes, “Oh, the Peaky Blinders song.” If you had said that was going to happen — not that you wouldn’t have believed it, but you wouldn’t have thought of that. I wouldn’t have thought that song would particularly be the song everyone knows the band for. “Into My Arms” I can sort of understand. I remember hearing that in its really early genesis. I remember hearing it as an instrumental and Nick had different lyrics to it, a little motif over and over. You sensed there was something really great about that song. Also, too, it could’ve been the least-known song. You just never really know what’s going to happen, in a way. What’s going to take flight and what isn’t. There’s some songs you think might and they just don’t. I never really think about songs in terms of that, though. I gave up on that years ago. It’s just about doing the best you can for them.

When Ghosteen came out, Nick talked about it concluding a trilogy, and there was this sonic arc that happened across Push The Sky Away , Skeleton Tree , and Ghosteen . The thing that was interesting about Carnage to me was, I felt you could hear a continuation of that sound in its latter songs, but then something like “Hand Of God” felt like Skeleton Tree , and then something like “Old Time” and “White Elephant” felt like they were fusing old and new — where there’s an aggression that wasn’t as present on the last few Bad Seeds records. After having concluded that trilogy with Ghosteen , do you feel you and Nick are now writing in some other direction, or you’re figuring out what that next horizon might be?

ELLIS: I remember when we did Push The Sky Away , the song “Push The Sky Away” felt like it was throwing down a challenge. There was something about it that seemed to be very bold. The sound, what was going on with it, the whole thing. It felt like where to launch off from, and it always felt like there were three records in this. I think Skeleton Tree was really embracing that challenge. When we did the playback for Ghosteen after we’d mixed it, we put it all up in order and Nick just turned around and looked at me with this expression on his face and he said, “Fuck, we did it.”

Ghosteen felt like such a bold exercise, this commitment to something. I got spooked by it and I thought it was the end of our collaboration. I’d always thought in my head, “One day we’ll do something really great.” I can get very superstitious about stuff and I run on it. When we made that record, I just deep down thought to myself, “I don’t think I could ever be involved in anything this great again.” I always thought one day my aim is to make something great, and it felt like that happened. It was actually some relief to go in the studio and make Blonde , the soundtrack for Andrew Dominik’s film. And then to make Carnage was some relief. I realized it is about turning up and working and seeing what happens.

I mean, I can’t imagine making another record like Ghosteen . It’s very easy to get nervous in the studio and you go towards the things that scare you, the things you don’t recognize. That’s one thing. But the other thing is following them through to the end and making some bold decisions. Like, “OK, we’re not going to have drums on this.” Try them, but we’re not. You can often see it in criticisms, too, when people can’t get their heads around something you’ve made. I find that all encouraging. I honestly don’t care what people think. Bad criticism never lands nicely. But if it’s constructive criticism… I think sometimes criticism too can show the strengths of what you’ve done. I like the fact that Ghosteen totally eschewed anything people might’ve thought the band might’ve been about.

For me, it’s the only time I’ve felt that if there was every anything else in the room, it was on that record. There was something going on making that record, the two weeks making it in Malibu. They were the two best weeks of my life. I’ve got Ghosteen shuffled off in this area of, this extraordinary experience and now I just keep working. In all honesty, I did think maybe this is the end, maybe Nick and I won’t do anything after that. We don’t just get in there. We have to feel like it’s going somewhere. I always know the day it’s not working is the day we’ll stop. It was the same with Jim and Mick: We’ll do this while we think it’s vital. For me, it’s a real privilege to make music and play live. If it’s not engaging me and I’m not honoring it, then I shouldn’t be there. Let someone else do it. I want to feel like what I’m doing is worthwhile.

With Carnage , did you feel like you got that feeling again after the questions Ghosteen left you with?

ELLIS: The thing with Carnage , after the lockdown Nick and I had been chatting on the phone a bunch and I was writing a book and doing different things. I did a record with Marianne Faithfull and Nick played on that. We were all trying to work out what to do in the lockdown experience, the COVID experience. We were finishing off the strings for Blonde and we decided to book a couple days in the studio, two or three, just to get together and have lunch and have a play kind of thing. The record, all the basic ideas, came together in those first couple days. Basically every song appeared in some configuration.

We had another phone call after that like, “Well, while it’s open, why don’t we go in and try to push them a bit further along.” Everything had to be done within the restrictions. We went in for a few more days, then we said, “OK, let’s see if we can make a record.” We went in for another few days, then mixed and mastered it. The COVID thing sped everything up a bit. We had been expecting to go on tour or whatever, and suddenly that wasn’t happening. I think there was just a real desire to get back in the studio. It was complicated to get together with anyone else, so just me and Nick went in together. We’ve done a whole bunch of stuff since then. We did music for a snow leopard documentary. A bunch of stuff for Cave Things. There’s a lot of stuff that’s coming out.

Yeah you guys have not stopped moving, I mean, at least for the last 10 years but then even in the late ‘00s you had Bad Seeds and Grinderman records back to back too.

ELLIS: Nick and I did our first score together in 2004. For me, that sort of signaled we could do something together, sitting down and improvising together. Where we could sit down and just start making stuff. I had known him since 1994 or 1995. I had played in the Bad Seeds with him. I lived near him for a couple years in London and we used to hang out. But it was the soundtrack stuff where we sat down and created this whole thing from scratch that showed this new way of working together.

It’s 15 or 16 years now that we’ve been working together making a lot of stuff. But it’s actually amplified. There’s more of it now than ever. It’s almost like looking back on things makes more sense to me, rather than at the time. When I used to do interviews for records, it made no fucking sense. You diminish the product. You don’t know, in a way, and what you have to say often doesn’t help the listener. I could talk much better now about a record we put out 25 years ago, seeing where it fits into things. You can see, once you’ve gotten away from it, the impact. It’s nice, at this point in my life, to see things in some perspective — why this happened or what pushed on to there, which you can’t at the time. All that’s important is what’s up ahead for me.

Nick Cave & The Bad Seeds - B-Sides & Rarities Part II [LPx2]

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Nick Cave & the Bad Seeds Announce New Album Wild God , Share Song: Listen

By Jazz Monroe

Nick Cave & the Bad Seeds are back with a new album. Wild God , the follow-up to Ghosteen , arrives August 30, and you can hear the title track below. Cave and Warren Ellis, who released the interim album Carnage in 2021, produced the new LP, with David Fridmann on mixing duties. Colin Greenwood—Radiohead bassist and sometime Cave touring bandmate —and guitarist Luis Almau are billed as additional performers on the LP. Scroll down to see the tracklist and cover art.

Cave said in press materials, “There’s no fucking around with this record. When it hits, it hits. It lifts you. It moves you. I love that about it.”

He added, “I hope the album has the effect on listeners that it’s had on me. It bursts out of the speaker, and I get swept up with it. It’s a complicated record, but it’s also deeply and joyously infectious. There is never a master plan when we make a record. The records rather reflect back the emotional state of the writers and musicians who played them. Listening to this, I don’t know, it seems we’re happy.”

The band—Cave, Ellis, Thomas Wydler, Martyn Casey, Jim Sclavunos, and George Vjestica—wrote and recorded Wild God at Miraval Studios in the French city of Provence and at Soundtree Studios in London. It will be released by the label Bad Seed Ltd., in partnership with Play It Again Sam .

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01 Song of the Lake 02 Wild God 03 Frogs 04 Joy 05 Final Rescue Attempt 06 Conversion 07 Cinnamon Horses 08 Long Dark Night 09 O Wow O Wow (How Wonderful She Is) 10 As the Waters Cover the Sea

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Nick Cave & The Bad Seeds Set ‘Wild God’ Tour of U.K. and Europe

The alternative rock outfit will kick-off their months-long Continental European run Sept. 24 at Rudolf Weber-Arena in Oberhausen, Germany.

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Nick Cave & The Bad Seeds

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“I never think about how a record is going to go live, it never, ever occurs to me,” explains Cave in a statement. “The lyric writing process is way too hard to take ideas like that into consideration. But, when I listen to Wild God now, I think we can really do something epic with these songs live. We’re really excited about that – the record just feels like it was made for the stage.”

Wild God  will drop Aug. 30 through Cave’s own label Bad Seed, via a new, exclusive  worldwide licensing agreement  with Play It Again Sam, an imprint of the independent [ PIAS ] label group.

Earlier, the ARIA Hall of Fame-inducted bandleader said of Wild God , “there’s no f—ing around with this record. When it hits, it hits. It lifts you. It moves you. I love that about it.”

Led by Cave, the current Bad Seeds lineup consists of Thomas Wydler, Martyn Casey, Jim Sclavunos, George Vjestica and longtime collaborator Warren Ellis, who produces the forthcoming album with Cave.

Wild God stretches across 10 tracks and was cut at Miraval Studios in Provence, France and Soundtree Studios in London, England, featuring contributions from Radiohead’s Colin Greenwood (bass) and Luis Almau (nylon string guitar, acoustic guitar).

It’s the followup to  Ghosteen , the critically-lauded two-disc longplay from 2019, which explored Cave’s exposure to grief and pain, following the sudden death of his son Arthur in 2015. 

Check out Nick Cave & The Bad Seeds’ 2024 U.K. and Europe tour dates here and below.

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Nick Cave’s Ghosteen: turning life-altering grief into other-worldly beauty

Nick cave’s new album ghosteen is an astonishing work which sees him transform his grief into a poetic masterpiece.

You can trust Louder Our experienced team has worked for some of the biggest brands in music. From testing headphones to reviewing albums, our experts aim to create reviews you can trust. Find out more about how we review.

Unveiled on Thursday night, Ghosteen was a surprise the outside world never knew existed until Nick Cave casually let slip about the new double album through his Red Hand Files website on 23rd September.

Ostensibly third and final part of the trilogy which started with Push The Sky Away in 2013 and continued with 2016's searing Skeleton Tree , Ghosteen is Cave’s transcendent, poetic masterpiece, and the most astonishing record of 2019.

Described by Cave as “a migrating spirit", Ghosteen is divided into two parts: an eight-song album Cave calls the "children", linked by the spoken word Fireflies to a second album, made up of two 12-minute epics, which he explains are their “parents”. 

There's a different mood and ambience here than in previous Bad Seeds records. Ghosteen is an album which raises the bar in terms of lyrical expression, sonic exploration, and even how an album can be released in modern times. 

Experiencing Ghosteen involves entering another man's world. It’s a world that is both painfully intimate and startlingly alien, as Cave and his right hand man Warren Ellis defy metaphysical artistic barriers to land in a place brimming with optimism, romantic affirmation, bloodletting lyricism and spiritual calm. It’s still cast in the shadow of a grief that will never go away, but that grief is now being dealt with in the best way Cave knows; with the most beautiful songs of an already masterful career. 

Most of Skeleton Tree had been written and recorded before the unimaginable tragedy of Cave losing his son, Arthur, in July 2015 . Its coruscating textures had already formed before he modified some lyrics. Now, we find Cave at the stage where that initial devastation gives way to handling the next phase. As Cave puts it: “to write beyond the trauma... to propel myself beyond the personal into a state of wonder." 

Quite disarmingly, 1985 Bad Seeds single Tupelo is revisited in opener Spinning Song and its reference to ‘the king of rock’n’roll’, before a deeply-felt ‘ And I love you ’ changes the song’s focus. Cave's voice has never sounded richer or more confident, nor more vulnerable, as he leaps into disarming falsetto for its ‘ peace will come in time ’ conclusion. 

Bright Horses is essentially a piano ballad coated in the evocative, looped-up electronic gauze Ellis weaves throughout the album. Cave addresses the cold real world: ‘ We're all so sick and tired of seeing things as they are/Horses are just horses and their manes aren't full of fire... And everyone is hidden and everyone is cruel/There's no shortage of tyrants and no shortage of fools .’ We later learn that love will save the day, as ‘ My baby's coming back now on the next train .’

Waiting On You starts on chain-clanking loop before another wracked declaration of love as he waits for his baby to come home - perhaps, in this instance, it’s someone else.

Ringing clock chimes, mutant strings and electronic rustling punctuate the gorgeous Night Raid , while lustrous drones and a choral maze underscore Sun Forest . Cave exorcises past themes, embodied in his lyrics: ‘ everybody hanging from a tree ’; declaring ‘ the future begins and I say goodbye to all that... and the past, with its savage undertow - let's go ’. Galleon Ship is whispered and hymnal, before Ghosteen Speaks assures ‘ I am beside you ’ over vocal drones. 

When Cave utters ‘ I try to forget to remember’ , it  suggests he'll never be fully out of those black woods. The mood darkens with Leviathan , its weighty chords and woozy tones swelling around another declaration of love that morphs into a mesmerising mantra, setting the tone for part two's 12-minute title track. Its floating wall of electronic detritus drops midway to an unexpected domestic scenario: ‘ Mama bear holds the remote, Papa bear just floats/Baby bear he has gone to the moon on a boat .’

Over hazy electronics, Fireflies states ‘ There is no order here, there is no middle ground, nothing can be planned ’ before Ghosteen ’s closing magnum opus, Hollywood , brings the album to a mountainous peak, drums and flickering bass entering for the first time, 65 minutes in. Cave says he wants to buy a house in the hills, with ‘ a tear-shaped pool and a gun that kills ’, then pulls back to the intimately-ambiguous coda that's already got his followers guessing: ‘ I'm just waiting for my time to come... I'm just waiting for peace to come ’. 

It's impossible for this writer to describe this album's impact without mentioning that I lost my soulmate last year. As Cave repeatedly affirms, he is so lucky to have his Susie as he wrangles a life that will never be the same again into its next phase. 

Grief brought Cave to appreciate his devoted followers through the Red Hand Files and intimate Audience With shows. It lead him to appreciating life, other people and what he's got. Fans and critics have been swift to respond with affirmations and acclaim; many who've heard this remarkable album said they wept uncontrollably. 

Has any artist ever gone so deep? All bars are raised, on so many levels.

Kris Needs is a British journalist and author, known for writings on music from the 1970s onwards. Previously secretary of the Mott The Hoople fan club, he became editor of ZigZag in 1977 and has written biographies of stars including Primal Scream, Joe Strummer and Keith Richards. He's also written for MOJO, Record Collector, Classic Rock, Prog, Electronic Sound, Vive Le Rock and Shindig!

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Album Review: Nick Cave Continues His Exploration of Grief on the Yearning Ghosteen

A record that blurs life's hard lines and searches for peace, love, and beauty

• Nick Cave and the Bad Seeds

The Lowdown: Life, it seems, is marked by separations. Hard lines are drawn daily between night and day, dream and reality, and most severely, life and death. This last dichotomy has always haunted post-punk legend Nick Cave , as he writes in his Red Hand Files : “For most of my life, I felt a strange gravitational pull toward an undisclosed traumatic event.” This “dreadful yearning,” as he describes it, manifested itself in Skeleton Tree , a barren and bare-boned album gravely interrupted by the loss of Cave’s son, Arthur, who died during the album’s production.

(Buy: Tickets to Upcoming Nick Cave Shows )

“I called out/ Right across the sea/ But the echo comes back empty,” Cave laments on that album’s titular closing track. In these lines, Cave describes the grief-stricken void — “the vast and darkened belly of the beast” — the loss of his son created. When Cave finally resolves at album’s end that “it’s alright now,” it’s hard to know whether he believes that’s true. But grief, like all change, is a process. Three years removed from Skeleton Tree , Cave continues his exploration of grief on Ghosteen , a record that blurs the hard lines of life’s separations and searches for peace, love, and beauty.

The Good: Swirling synths are the first sounds heard on Ghosteen , signaling a continuation of the Bad Seeds’ recent ambient minimalism. This time, the simplicity is mesmerizing, inviting us into meditation as light piano pieces and sparse, melodic lines weave through an omnipresent haze shimmering with feathery light. Across this soundscape, Cave builds a dream world filled with prancing fire horses, stairways to heaven, and ghastly specters travelling down rain-glossed streets. Each line evokes poetic scenes with a vibrancy to rival the best of literature and cinema.

(Read: 10 Goth-Rock Albums Every Music Fan Should Own )

Like Yann Martel’s Life of Pi , Cave’s world questions our idea of reality. “We’re all so sick and tired of seeing things as they are,” he remarks on “Bright Horses”, reminding us that our hearts yearn for something more wonderful than just what is seen. Imagination and reality are not at odds, Cave seems to argue, nor are the physical and the spiritual. “There’s nothing wrong with loving something/ You can’t hold in your hand,” he sings on the title track, a reminder that love is much more mystical than we perceive.

Love is the propelling force and most important meditation of Ghosteen . It’s what breaks down the barriers between life and death, allowing Cave to remain connected to the spirit of his son. “I am beside you, you are beside me,” Cave sings from his son’s perspective on “Ghosteen Speaks”, as he remembers that “nothing is something where something is meant to be.” At times, the absence of something or someone is felt more tangibly than their presence.

Cave expresses this on closing track “Hollywood”, the album’s darkest trek into grief, where he awaits death, reunion with his son, and a final peace. It’s a hard, but necessary song that grounds the record in the understanding that grief, even the healthy display of grief Cave shows us across Ghosteen , hurts like hell. As he closes this chapter of what is sure to be a lifelong process, Cave recounts a tale from a Buddhist myth, reminding himself and the listener that everyone has experienced grief. It’s through our shared sorrow and empathy for each other that we find the strength to fully live.

The Bad: Though Ghosteen ’s emotional meditations on life, love, and grief offer little to critique, the first side’s closer, “Leviathan”, offers the least insight and clashes tonally with the first seven tracks. The song’s haunting repetition of “I love my baby and my baby loves me” feels a bit unsettling, darkening the shimmer that pervades much of side one. Despite this, the sonic tension created by late-album tracks like “Leviathan” and “Hollywood” parallel the reality that grief and hope are not opposites, but rather siblings always in tension with each other.

The Verdict: The biblical book of Hebrews says, “Faith is the assurance of things hoped for, the conviction of things not seen.” Never has an album expressed this idea clearer than Ghosteen . Though grief and loss left Cave searching for answers, he is by no means aimless. “Sometimes a little faith can go a long, long way,” he sings on “Waiting for You”, believing with conviction that one day he will celebrate a reunion with his son.

But faith doesn’t necessarily make the journey easy. Though he knows love and peace will carry him to the end, Cave, like Bono, still hasn’t found what he’s looking for. “It’s a long way to find peace of mind,” Cave repeats at the album’s close. Even so, as difficult as it is to feel, Cave has been assured since the beginning of the journey that “peace will come in time.”

Essential Tracks: “Waiting for You”, “Galleon Ship”, and “Ghosteen”

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Nick Cave & The Bad Seeds announce 2024 UK and European ‘Wild God’ tour

"The record just feels like it was made for the stage"

Nick Cave And The Bad Seeds have today (March 15) announced details of a UK and European tour – check out the full dates below.

• READ MORE: Nick Cave: “There’s no metric that says virtuousness makes good art”

The tour will take place this autumn and follows on from the recent announcement that the band will release a new album this summer, ‘Wild God’. 

The band will kick off their tour on September 24 in Oberhausen, Germany, and will end in Paris, France on November 17. The band are due to play six dates in the UK at Leeds, Glasgow, Manchester, Cardiff, London, Dublin and Birmingham.

Speaking about the upcoming tour, Cave said: “I never think about how a record is going to go live, it never, ever occurs to me. The lyric writing process is way too hard to take ideas like that into consideration. But, when I listen to ‘Wild God’ now, I think we can really do something epic with these songs live. We’re really excited about that – the record just feels like it was made for the stage.”

Tickets for the shows go on sale on March 22 at 10am local time and you can get yours here .

Supporting the band will be Dry Cleaning , The Murder Capital and Black Country, New Road .

Nick Cave & The Bad Seeds’ 2024 tour dates are:

SEPTEMBER 24 – Oberhausen, Germany – Rudolf Weber ARENA 26 – Amsterdam, Netherlands – Ziggo Dome 29 – Berlin, Germany – Uber Arena

OCTOBER 2 – Oslo, Norway – Oslo Spektrum 3 – Stockholm, Sweden – Hovet 5 – Copenhagen, Denmark – Royal Arena 8 – Hamburg, Germany – Barclays Arena 10 – Lodz, Poland – Atlas Arena 11 – Krakow, Poland – TAURON Arena 13 – Budapest, Hungary – Papp László Sportaréna 15 – Zagreb, Croatia – Arena Zagreb 17 – Prague, Czechia – O2 arena 18 – Munich, Germany – Olympiahalle 20 – Milan, Italy – Milan Forum 22 – Zurich, Switzerland – Hallenstadion 24 – Barcelona, Spain – Palau Sant Jordi 25 – Madrid, Spain – WiZink Center 27 – Lisbon, Portugal – MEO Arena 30 – Antwerp, Belgium Sportpaleis

NOVEMBER 2 – Leeds, UK – first direct arena 3 – Glasgow, UK – OVO Hydro 5 – Manchester, UK – AO Arena 6 – Cardiff, UK – Utilita Arena 8 – London, UK – The O2 12 – Dublin, Ireland – 3Arena 15 – Birmingham, UK – Resorts World Arena 17 – Paris, France – Accor Arena  

The band’s new album is set for release on August 30 and will comprise of 10 songs. It will see the band move between themes of convention and experimentation – introducing left-turns that heighten the rich imagery and emotive narratives created by the frontman.

“I hope the album has the effect on listeners that it’s had on me. It bursts out of the speaker, and I get swept up with it. It’s a complicated record, but it’s also deeply and joyously infectious,” Cave said of the upcoming release.

He continued: “There is never a masterplan when we make a record. The records rather reflect back the emotional state of the writers and musicians who played them. Listening to this, I don’t know, it seems we’re happy. There’s no fucking around with this record. When it hits, it hits. It lifts you. It moves you. I love that about it.”

Cave also recently said that the album was “full of secrets”. “I don’t want to say much about the album itself until it is released in August and you get to hear all the songs, but I can tell you that it is a record full of secrets,” he said on his blog, The Red Hand Files .

“It is made up of a series of complex and interlinking narratives, the title song ‘Wild God’ being the primary point of propulsion, with the songs all feeding off each other – not so much to tell a story, but to rally round an acutely vulnerable and mysterious ‘event’ that resides at the heart of the album’s central song, ‘Conversion’.”

To mark the announcement of the album, the band also shared the title track as the lead single , earlier this month capturing the same balance between newness and their signature sound as expected in the full album.

The writing process for ‘Wild God’ began on New Year’s Day 2023, and the tracks were laid down with sessions at Miraval in Provence and Soundtree in London. From there, the Bad Seeds introduced their unique spin, and additional performances were added from Radiohead’s Colin Greenwood (bass) and Luis Almau (nylon string guitar, acoustic guitar).

Alongside Cave himself, Warren Ellis co-produced the album, and it was mixed by David Fridmann. You can pre-order ‘Wild God’ here , and check out the album artwork and tracklisting below.

Last year, following the release of his book Faith, Hope & Carnage , Nick Cave spoke to NME and revealed what fans can expect from his upcoming music.

When asked if he was pouring more love into his music, he responded: “I don’t know about the music, but these days I feel a more urgent need to connect with people.

“There’s a kind of duty in that, that maybe I didn’t feel before. That I have at my disposal something that’s very valuable – to make music and I don’t want to squander that opportunity in phoning in gigs or doing half-hearted attempts. Everyone is as important as each other.”

News of the new album comes after Cave launched a mysterious countdown clock earlier this month (March 5), but did not reveal to fans what would happen when it struck zero.

The first word of a new Nick Cave and The Bad Seeds album came back in October 2022 when he confirmed in a Q&A that he was about to start the writing process . He later said that the eventual writing processed commenced at 9am on New Year’s Day 2023 .

In July last year, he wrote on his site that they were “finishing” work on recording the new album, and then in November, Cave said he was about to start mixing on the record in Buffalo .

The most recent Nick Cave & The Bad Seeds album was 2019’s ‘Ghosteen’. In a glowing five-star review , NME wrote: “‘Ghosteen’ is one of the most devastatingly accurate accounts of grief that you’ll ever listen to. Yet it’s also, astoundingly, one of the most comforting. Few mediations on grief manage to navigate despair and catharsis as well as this.”

As well as ‘Wild God’ being on the way, there is also a television adaptation of Cave’s 2009 novel The Death Of Bunny Monro in the works , with former Doctor Who star Matt Smith recently having been confirmed to take the title role .

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Nick Cave and The Bad Seeds announce The Wild God Tour

The shows will be in support of their 18th () studio lp, which is due to arrive later this summer..

18th March 2024 Words: Daisy Carter

Black Country New Road , Dry Cleaning , Nick Cave and The Bad Seeds , The Murder Capital , News , Listen

Following the news that Nick Cave and The Bad Seeds will drop their 18th studio album ‘Wild God’ on 30th August (on Bad Seed Records, in partnership with Play It Again Sam), the band have now confirmed a run of UK and European tour dates to celebrate its release.

Joining them for the shows will be one of either Dry Cleaning , The Murder Capital , or Black Country, New Road - so whichever date they attend, fans are in for a special night. Nick Cave, meanwhile, has commented that “when I listen to ‘Wild God’ now, I think we can really do something epic with these songs live. We’re really excited about that - the record just feels like it was made for the stage.”

Tickets for The Wild God Tour will go on general sale at 10:00am on Friday 22nd March here .

Album Revie

Nick cave and the bad seeds - ghosteen.

Magnificently composed and emphatically emotive, ‘Ghosteen’ is an unforgettable piece of work.

Spanning ten tracks, the new LP is set to to continue to expand the band’s rich sonic and literary world, using moments in their collective past as jumping-off points for experimentation and reinvention. Having begun writing on New Year’s Day 2023, Cave then co-produced ‘Wild God’ alongside bandmate Warren Ellis - a process which took place between sessions in Miravel, Provence, and London’s Soundtree studios.

“I hope the album has the effect on listeners that it’s had on me,” Cave has said. “It bursts out of the speaker, and I get swept up with it. It’s a complicated record, but it’s also deeply and joyously infectious. There is never a masterplan when we make a record. The records rather reflect back the emotional state of the writers and musicians who played them. Listening to this, I don’t know, it seems we’re happy.”

You can listen to the album’s title track and check out the full run of The Wild God Tour dates below.

* w/ Dry Cleaning; ^ w/ The Murder Captial; % w/ Black Country, New Road

SEPTEMBER 2024 24 Oberhausen, Rudolf Weber-ARENA* 26 Amsterdam, Ziggo Dome* 29 Berlin, Uber Arena*

OCTOBER 2024 02 Oslo, Oslo Spektrum* 03 Stockholm, Hovet* 05 Copenhagen, Royal Arena* 08 Hamburg, Barclays Arena* 10 Lodz, Atlas Arena* 11 Krakow, TAURON Arena* 13 Budapest, Papp László Sportaréna^ 15 Zagreb, Arena Zagreb^ 17 Prague, O2 Arena^ 18 Munich, Olympiahalle^ 20 Milan, Milan Forum^ 22 Zurich, Hallenstadion^ 24 Barcelona, Palau Sant Jordi^ 25 Madrid, WiZinkCenter^ 27 Lisbon, MEO Arena^ 30 Antwerp, Sportpaleis^

NOVEMBER 2024 02 Leeds, First Direct Arena% 03 Glasgow, OVO Hydro% 05 Manchester, AO Arena% 06 Cardiff, Utilita Arena% 08 London, The O2% 12 Dublin, 3Arena% 15 Birmingham, Resorts World Arena% 17 Paris, Accor Arena%

The ‘Wild God’ full tracklist is: 1. Song of the Lake 2. Wild God 3. Frogs 4. Joy 5. Final Rescue Attempt 6. Conversion 7. Cinnamon Horses 8. Long Dark Night 9. O Wow O Wow (How Wonderful She Is) 10. As the Waters Cover the Sea

Tags: Black Country New Road , Dry Cleaning , Nick Cave and The Bad Seeds , The Murder Capital , News , Listen

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• July 16, 2009 Setlist

Nick Cave & the Bad Seeds Setlist at B1 Maximum Club, Moscow, Russia

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Tour: Dig, Lazarus, Dig!!! Tour statistics Add setlist

• Tupelo Play Video
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12 activities (last edit by PaperbagWriter , 25 Jan 2020, 15:35 Etc/UTC )

Songs on Albums

• Dig, Lazarus, Dig!!!
• Midnight Man
• We Call Upon the Author
• Get Ready for Love
• There She Goes, My Beautiful World
• The Ship Song
• The Weeping Song
• Papa Won't Leave You, Henry
• Straight to You
• Stagger Lee
• The Mercy Seat
• Red Right Hand
• Love Letter
• Into My Arms

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Nick Cave & the Bad Seeds Gig Timeline

• Jul 10 2009 T in the Park 2009 Kinross, Scotland Add time Add time
• Jul 11 2009 Oxegen 2009 Naas, Ireland Add time Add time
• Jul 16 2009 B1 Maximum Club This Setlist Moscow, Russia Add time Add time
• Jul 17 2009 Stereoleto Festival 2009 #2 Saint Petersburg, Russia Add time Add time
• Jul 19 2009 Latitude Festival 2009 Southwold, England Add time Add time

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