Invazive 2021

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.

An English hard rock institution founded by former Deep Purple vocalist David Coverdale, Whitesnake emerged in the late 1970s with a style steeped in the driving British blues-rock of bands like Thin Lizzy, Led Zeppelin, and of course, Deep Purple. After recalibrating their sound to better adapt to the burgeoning '80s hair and pop-metal scene, they found commercial success with 1984's Slide It In and then cannonballed into the mainstream in 1987 with the release of their multi-platinum-selling eponymous seventh effort, which spawned the power ballad "Is This Love" and the massive crossover number one hit "Here I Go Again."