Nick Cave and The Bad Seeds Embrace Joy in ‘Wild God’

At first, the word “joy” seems incongruous when mentioned in the same sentence as Nick Cave and the Bad Seeds. For a good part of his career (now going on 40 years) as the band’s singer and namesake leader, Cave famously inhabited the persona of a dark, intimidating and tortured artist whose turbulent lyrics tackled topics such as religion, relationships and mortality. For instance, on “The Mercy Seat,” one of his most famous songs, Cave sings from the point of view of a prisoner on death row: “And my body is on fire/And God is never far away.” His distinctive baritone singing further enhanced his reputation as an intense performer with a worldview that lies somewhere between heaven and hell.

But in the last 10 years, the Australian artist’s perspective has matured along with the Bad Seeds’ sound, especially amid tragic circumstances in his personal life: in 2015, Arthur Cave, one of the singer’s twin sons, died at age 15 after he fell from a cliff in England. Then seven years later, Cave announced in a statement that his eldest son Jethro Lazenby, 31, had passed away. The Bad Seeds’ last two albums, Skeleton Tree (2016) and Ghosteen (2019), along with 2022’s Faith, Hope and Carnage, a book Cave co-authored with Seán O’Hagan, were released during that period of introspection.

This time around, however, the Bad Seeds’ new studio album, Wild God (August 30) reflects a more uplifting and hopeful outlook. As the affable Cave, 66, tells Newsweek during a recent visit to New York City, Wild God signals the end of a particular chapter in his life. “This one feels like we brought the Bad Seeds back,” he says. “It was a sort of explosion of activity and life. It’s joyous. There’s a song [on the new record] called ‘Joy.’ I do have a particular understanding of what that word actually means, and it’s a deeper word than it appears to be.”

This is from an artist whose previous reputation for chaos dates back to his late ’70s/early ’80s pre-Bad Seeds group, the Birthday Party. “I think joy on some level is a form of suffering, you could say,” Cave continues. “It’s a sort of upward explosion with the knowledge of what we are as human beings. This record’s like that. It keeps bursting forth.”

Cave says that the mostly exuberant sound of Wild God, which combines rock and electronic-influenced textures, wasn’t intended to be a deliberate reaction to the reflective and spare-sounding Skeleton Tree and Ghosteen. What he wanted from the outset was for the members of the Bad Seeds—multi-instrumentalist Warren Ellis, bassist Martyn P. Casey, percussionist/drummer Jim Sclavunos, guitarist George Vjestica and drummer Thomas Wydler—to be featured more prominently in the music after the last two group albums.