2024-09-01 20:11:15
After five years, Australian singer Nick Cave released a new album with the band The Bad Seeds. He will present the album called Wild God live on October 17 in Prague’s O2 arena. According to critics, it is not as dark as the previous records Skeleton Tree and Ghosteen or the concerts that were affected by the grief over the death of the musician’s two sons.
The novelty combines light and shadow. It gives an insight into the inner life of an exceptional artist, the DPA agency writes about the album, with which 66-year-old Nick Cave is said to have found a new path after the wounds of fate. “The record is complicated, but also deeply and infectiously joyful. When I hear it, I feel like we were happy during the recording,” he is quoted as saying by the AFP agency.
The frontman of the formation Nick Cave & The Bad Seeds has a career spanning more than forty years. Today, he sells out stadiums, yet he never entered the mainstream. He only had success in the charts with the song Where the Wild Roses Grow, recorded in 1995 with Australian pop star Kylie Minogue. In the new millennium, his composition Red Right Hand was featured in the TV crime drama Gangs of Birmingham.
Cave has fallen on hard times in the last decade. In 2015, his fifteen-year-old son Arthur died after falling off a cliff in Brighton, southern England, after trying LSD for the first time. Last year, Cave announced the death of his 31-year-old son Jethro. The cause has not been released.
The rocker mourned his sons at concerts together with the audience. “In a way, they saved me,” he explains, explaining why in return he started a website called The Red Hand Files, where he answers questions from fans.
He recently admitted on Australian television that he had been carried away with himself for a long time and considered himself a genius. His life had a fixed rhythm. Every day he sat down, wrote, and everything else fell by the wayside. After the death of his sons, he reconsidered this way of existence. “Suddenly I saw how foolish this shameful self-gratification was,” he states.
Nick Cave recording the Wild God album. | Photo: Megan Cullen
Death is also present in the Wild God collection. Nick Cave’s eighteenth album with The Bad Seeds contains ten songs including O Wow O Wow (How Wonderful She Is) dedicated to his former partner and bandmate Anita Lane, who died in 2021.
Otherwise, the music on the new record is intense, but softened by the choirs, AFP notes. The musician himself says that songs like Frogs or Conversion make him smile. It is said that he almost called the new record Joy, translated as Joy, which is just the name of one of the songs.
Nick Cave remains a dude in a dark suit, with long dark hair. He looks like he hasn’t changed in twenty years. “I don’t know what caused it. Maybe a 20-year heroin addiction? And a good face cream,” he jokes.
Instead of gloomy, stormy ballads with emotionally intense lyrics, this time he jokes, he seems relaxed and with the new record he seems to be breathing in a slightly happier stage, notes the AFP agency. “Wild God is the sound of the curtain being raised, letting in some almost blinding light. There is hope. Miracles happen,” notes Nick Cave.
He will present the new album with the band The Bad Seeds live on the autumn tour, during which he will also perform on October 17 in Prague’s O2 arena. “It’s going to be great,” he promises.
Video: How Nick Cave recorded the Wild God album
The two-minute video shows how Nick Cave and The Bad Seeds recorded the Wild God album. | Video: Pias Recordings