Perhaps the most telling moment on Wild God comes about a quarter of an hour in. A track called Joy opens in a manner characteristic of Nick Cave’s recent songs: the kind of drifting, serpentine style, beatless and uncoupled from standard verse-chorus structure, that he and chief collaborator Warren Ellis began experimenting with on 2013’s Push the Sky Away. That style came to power the extraordinary sequence of albums that followed: 2016’s harrowing Skeleton Tree; the exploration of loss, grief and redemption that was 2019’s Ghosteen; 2021’s lockdown-mired Carnage. Now, on Joy, synthesised tones hover and shimmer as Cave strikes a melancholy series of chords on the piano, alongside what sounds like a lowing french horn. He sings of waking in the night, haunted by a voice that turns out to belong to “a ghost in giant sneakers, laughing, stars around his head … a flaming boy”.
The obvious assumption to make is that Cave is being visited by his late son, Arthur, whose death in an accidental fall in 2015 – and Cave’s response to it – has informed vast tranches of his subsequent output. Not just music, but 2019’s Q&A format Conversations With Nick Cave tour; Faith, Hope and Carnage, the extended interview with Sean O’Hagan published as an acclaimed book in 2022; and The Red Hand Files, the online newsletter where, as the New Yorker’s Amanda Petrusich beautifully put it, he frequently acts as “an unexpected Virgil for anyone mired in grief and casting about for a warm but unsentimental guide”.
