Two years ago, at the height of lockdown, a fan wrote to Nick Cave’s Red Hand Files website asking his opinions about prayer. As usual on a website where anyone is invited to ask Cave anything, his answer was long and thoughtful. “Prayer is not dependent on the existence of a subject,” he said. “You need not pray to anyone. It is just as valuable to pray into your disbelief, as it is to pray into your belief, for prayer is not an encounter with an external agent, rather it is an encounter with oneself.”
Clearly, this was a topic that exercised Cave during the pandemic: Seven Psalms features seven prayers, written in 2020, with a musical accompaniment by his chief collaborator, Warren Ellis. Releasing something like this would count as a dramatically leftfield turn for most major alt-rock artists, but then Cave has hardly shied away from the complex issue of faith. His changing thoughts about God are a kind of connective tissue that runs throughout his body of work.
