Ghosteen Nick Cave

Plenty of artists have built careers out of writing about death, but only a tiny handful have shown the capacity to honestly and eloquently write about grief. Nick Cave knows more than a bit about grief, and he's been willing to stare into that particular abyss, doing so with a particularly keen focus on 2013's Push the Sky Away and 2016's Skeleton Tree, the latter partially informed by the death of his teenage son in 2015. Grief is hardly the only emotion that Cave and his ensemble the Bad Seeds explores on 2019's Ghosteen, but a sense of loss and a heavy heart permeates these songs like a thick fog, as well as the bonds of family and how they can bring us together and keep us apart…

In 2022, Nick Cave and Warren Ellis returned to their native Australia for 16 shows, taking their acclaimed 2021 album Carnage on the road, along with songs from the Nick Cave and The Bad Seeds catalogue. Three performances at the Sydney Opera House on December 16th, 17th and 18th were the climactic shows of an emotional trip, captured for a luminous new live album, Australian Carnage - Live At The Sydney Opera House.

Given the spare, textural soundscapes of 2016's Skeleton Tree and 2019's Ghosteen, it was not hard to wonder just how much Nick Cave still needed the Bad Seeds to bring his visions to life. 2021's Carnage suggests he may not need them at all outside of his longtime collaborator Warren Ellis. Cave and Ellis collaborated on Carnage while they were in lockdown thanks to the COVID-19 pandemic of 2020, and in most respects it's of a piece with Skeleton Tree and Ghosteen, with Cave's dour, doomstruck lyrical meditations taking center stage while the musical accompaniment hovers in the background.

Following on from the successful An Idiot Prayer live album and livestream event released this year, Nick Cave releases B-Sides and Rarities: Part I and Part 2. B-Sides and Rarities: Part 2 was compiled by Nick Cave and Warren Ellis and features 27 tracks. It includes tracks from Dig, Lazarus, Dig!!! in 2006 to 2019s Ghosteen and 19 rare and unreleased tracks including first recordings of ‘Skeleton Tree’, ‘Girl in Amber’, ‘Bright Horses’ and ‘Waiting for You’.

The cover art for Nick Cave & The Bad Seeds’ 17th album couldn’t feel more removed from the man once known as a snarling, terrifying prince of poetic darkness. This heavenly forest with its vibrant flowers, rays of sun and woodland creatures feels comically opposed to anything Cave has ever represented—but perhaps that’s the point. This pastel fairy tale sets the scene for Ghosteen, his most minimalist, supernatural work to date, in which he slips between realms of fantasy and reality as a means to accept life and death, his past and future.