Wild God

It can be dangerous, Nick Cave says, to look back on one’s body of work and seek meaning in the music you’ve made. “Most records, I couldn't really tell you by listening what was going on in my life at the time,” he tells Apple Music. “But the last three, they're very clear impressions of what life has actually been like. I was in a very strange place.”

In the years following the 2015 death of his son Arthur, Cave’s work—in song; in the warm counsel of his newsletter, The Red Hand Files; in the extended conversation-turned-book he wrote with journalist Seán O’Hagan, Faith, Hope and Carnage—has been marked by grief, meeting unimaginable loss with more imagination still. It’s made for some of the most remarkable and moving music of his nearly 50-year career, perhaps most notably the feverish minimalism of 2019’s Ghosteen, which he intended to act as a kind of communique to his dead son, wherever he might be.

Though Cave would lose another son, Jethro, in 2022, Wild God finds the 66-year-old singer-songwriter someplace new, marvelling at the beauty all around him, reuniting with The Bad Seeds, who—with the exception of multi-instrumentalist songwriting foil Warren Ellis—had slowly receded from view. Once a symbol of post-punk antipathy, he is now open to the world like never before. “Maybe there is a feeling like things don't matter in the same way as perhaps they did before,” he says. “These terrible things happened, the world has done its worst. I feel released in some way from those sorts of feelings. Wild God is much more playful, joyous, vibrant. Because life is good. Life is better.”

It’s an album that feels like an embrace. That much you can hear in the first seconds of “Song of the Lake”, a swirl of ascendant synths and thick, chewy bass (compliments of Radiohead’s Colin Greenwood) upon which Cave tells a tale of brokenness that never quite resolves, as though to fully heal or be put back together again has never really been the point of all this, of being human. The mood is largely improvisational and loose, Cave leaning into moments of catharsis like a man who’d been waiting for them. He offers levity (the colossal, delirious title track) and light (“Frogs”, “Final Rescue Attempt”). On “O Wow O Wow (How Wonderful She Is)”, a tribute to the late Anita Lane, his former creative and romantic partner, he conjures a sense of play that would have seemed impossible a few years ago. “I think that it's just an immense enjoyment in playing,” he says of the band's influence on the album. “I think the songs just have these delirious, ecstatic surges of energy, which was a feeling in the studio when we recorded it. We're not taking it too seriously in a way, although it's a serious record. We were having a good time. I was having a really good time.”

There is no shortage of heartbreak or darkness to be found here. But “Joy”, the album’s finest moment (and original namesake), is a monument to optimism, a radical thought. For six minutes, he sounds suspended in twilight, pulling words out of thin air, synths fluttering and humming and flickering around him, peals of piano and French horn coming and going like comets. “We’ve all had too much sorrow, now is the time for joy,” he sings, quoting a ghost who’s come to his bedside, a “flaming boy” in sneakers. “Joy doesn't necessarily mean happiness,” Cave says upon reflection. “Joy in a way is a form of suffering, in the sense that it understands the notion of suffering, and it's these momentary ecstatic leaps we are capable of that help us rise out of that suffering for a moment of time. It is sort of an explosion of positive feeling, and I think the record's full of that, full of these moments. In fact, the record itself is that.”

While that may sound like a complete departure from its most recent predecessors, Wild God shares a similar intention, an urge to communicate with his late children, from this world to theirs. That may never fade. “If there's one impulse I have, it’s that I would like my kids who are no longer with us to know that we are okay, that [wife] Susie and I are okay,” Cave says. “I think that's why when I listened to the record back, I just listened to it with a great big smile on my face. Because it's just full of life and it's full of reasons to be happy. I think this record can definitely improve the condition of my children. All of the things that I create these days are an attempt to do that.”