Wild God by Nick Cave and the Bad Seeds (PIAS Records, 2024).
Death has been a constant theme for Nick Cave over the six decades of his career. Take the vampiric look of the man himself: dressed in dark suits, shirt sans tie and open to mid-sternum, a build best described as skeletal, and long greased black hair coming out of a high-domed pallid pate. Cave’s appearance, combined with the distinctive baritone, and the backing of the Bad Seeds, makes for an emotive stage presence.
Along with the appearance of the Aussie artist is a songscape to match: “The Mercy Seat”[1] is the last testament of a man facing the electric chair; “Red Right Hand”[2] is about a sly devil, later used as the theme song of Peaky Blinders; and there’s an album simply entitled Murder Ballads (1996).[3]Death is meant to hold you in a kind of fascination in these works, and so too is the subject of God. Cave, a lifelong reader of the Bible, evokes a Christ-haunted Southern gothic world.
By the early 2000s, a greater poignancy entered Cave’s music. With regards to death, one might say that the shift in emphasis went from morbidity to mortality. This would come to a tragic apex (or nadir) in July 2015 when Cave’s 15-year-old son Arthur fell accidentally from a cliff and died. Cave and his wife Susie were devastated. Personally and artistically this was a defining event about which Cave speaks extensively in Faith, Hope and Carnage, a book-length interview with journalist Seán O’Hagan.[4] Cave’s discography since his son’s death—Skeleton Tree (2016), Ghosteen (2019), and now Wild God (2024) —can be understood as forming a triptych exploring grief, loss, and life after personal tragedy.
Cave recorded Skeleton Tree at the time of Arthur’s death. Cave chose to continue working on the album as a way of maintaining some sense of normalcy amid tragedy. He reports that he never listened to the entire album and that he still feels a certain disconnect from it.[5]
The album feels alternatingly vast and intimate, on the margin between waking and dreaming. Altogether, it is a testament to life that continues after death, in its sorrow but also in the joy and peace that mysteriously still comes.
By contrast, Ghosteen, released four years after the event, is itself an artifact of grief, and of Cave’s own processing and making peace with his loss: “Arthur was snatched away, he just disappeared, and this felt like some way of making contact again and saying goodbye.”[6]
Following these two albums, Wild God is a testament to how one continues after a death, or rather, after deaths. In his interview, Cave mentioned a sense of three deaths with Arthur’s fall. Along with his son, there was the sense of Cave himself dying: “There was a raging conversation going on in my head endlessly. . . . It was like a conversation with my own dying self—or with death itself.” And there was also a sense of Susie’s dying: “Susie’s return to the world was the most moving thing I have ever witnessed. . . . It was as if Susie had died before my eyes, but in time returned to the world.”[7] As if this was not enough, Cave faced further loss in the years since Ghosteen: sometime during the COVID lockdown, Cave’s mother died; in 2021, his once romantic partner and musical collaborator Anita Lane died; and his eldest son Jethro Lazenby died in 2022.
In ten tracks, Wild God takes a listener through a mythic world in which the titular figure is death itself (also called the ‘old god’ or ‘old man). The album feels alternatingly vast and intimate, on the margin between waking and dreaming. Altogether, it is a testament to life that continues after death, in its sorrow but also in the joy and peace that mysteriously still comes.
The opening songs establish the failure of answers that once seemed to satisfy, an overturning of the order in which death once reigned secure. In “Song of the Lake,” a man who sees real beauty is so overcome by the fleetingness of it all that he is reduced to paralysis and a rift arises between him and his lover. In “Wild God,” this now forgotten old god absconds from the retirement home and flies through the world to see how things stand since his glory days. Death too finds himself unsatisfied with the answers he once was able to provide.
The next two tracks offer a tonal contrast. “Frogs” is the eponymous exalting, leaping creature seen by the narrator as he walks home in the pouring rain after church. All creation dances and exalts in the water from heaven, the narrator ecstatically singing “Kill me!” as a kind of nunc dimittis,an assent to God that he can now die happy. “Joy” works lyrically in utter sincerity. In this song, Cave narrates a midnight vision of a ghostly teenage visitor who tells him “We’ve all had too much sorrow, now is the time for joy.” The sole appearance of Arthur in Wild God,“Joy” is a work of beauty.
The next songs swingback to the rule of the old god, but now in the intimacy of a human relationship, here in the pain of a cleavage. “Final Rescue Attempt” names the hurt of reaching for one another while unable to connect. “Conversion” tells of the narrator’s agony and ecstasy at seeing his lover given over to the old god Death. Knowing what Cave recalled his wife’s own ‘death’ at the loss of their son, it is difficult to hear these songs without that heartrending overlay.
“Cinnamon Horses,” an interpretively difficult song, plays somberly in symbolic images to create a feeling rather than a story of aloneness and melancholy, which becomes the very “Long Dark Night“ of the next track. This rings as the album’s redemptive high point. Here, the narrator recalls a dreaming encounter with the old god who speaks the narrator’s name. “How could he know/ When I did not even know my name?” That naming strikes up hope and the possibility that “Maybe a long dark night is coming down.”
“O Wow O Wow (How Wonderful She Is)” plays a double role. First, it is a tribute toAnita Lane (d. 2021), Cave’s good friend. The song extols “how wonderful she is” to sunny (nearly cartoonish) lengths, apparently true to Lane’s larger-than-life personality. But the last verse turns to its second role as a demonstration of how death is transformed. Out of the Disney-esque, the woman of the song is greeted by “her friends, now dead,” welcoming her to something beyond this life.
In “As the Waters Cover the Sea,” the unexpected Paschal finale of the album, Cave situates another moment of early morning wakefulness, but no longer with false dawns and spectral messengers. It is now a mother who wakes to see her son “As He steps from the tomb/ In His rags and His wounds.” The rest of the two-minute track is a blessing sung by Cave with gospel choir backing.
This final track puts a Christian listener in mind of the strange paradox at the heart of the Christian claim: that Death, this ‘old god,’ has been defeated, but in such a way that it becomes the instrument of its own delimitation, of its own dethronement. As the Paschal Troparion sings again and again, Christ is “trampling death by death.” Wild God is a man’s reflection on what this means in the experience of loss, an intuited sense that death and sorrow are, in the light of this new economy, pointers toward God. Or as Cave puts it, “It actually feels like grief and God are somehow intertwined. It feels that, in grief, you draw closer to the veil that separates this world from the next.”[8]
[1] Nick Cave and the Bad Seeds, “Mercy Seat,” 1988, track 1 on Tender Prey, Mute Records.
[2] Nick Cave and the Bad Seeds, “Red Right Hand,” 1994, track 5 on Let Love In,Mute Records.
[3] Nick Cave and the Bad Seeds, Murder Ballads, 1996, Mute Records.
[4] Cave, Nick and Seán O’Hagan, Faith, Hope and Carnage (New York: Picador, 2022).
[5] Ibid., 65.
[6] Ibid., 49.
[7] Ibid., 42–43.
[8] Ibid., 32.
Nathan Bradford Williams is completing his PhD at the University of Toronto with a thesis on the theology of icons and the music of Arvo Pärt. He is in formation for the diaconate in the Romanian Catholic Eparchy of Canton. He lives and writes from Nashville, Tennessee.