Wild God

Joy is a complicated word in Nick Cave’s music, which is exactly why it matters on Wild God. Cave considered calling the album Joy or Conversion before deciding on a title he felt was more powerful and mysterious. The finished record does contain uplift, but not the tidy kind. It surges, collapses, gathers voices and instruments around Cave’s writing, and repeatedly treats ecstasy as something hard-won rather than cheerful. After years in which grief and stripped-back collaboration had shaped much of his work, the return of the Bad Seeds as a full creative force changes the temperature immediately.

Wild God was recorded at Miraval in France and Soundtree in London, produced by Cave and Warren Ellis and mixed by Dave Fridmann. Early 2023 sessions with Cave largely on piano and Ellis on synthesisers left Cave dissatisfied with the sparse result. The fuller Bad Seeds approach followed, making this the first studio album since Skeleton Tree in 2016 to feature the band so substantially. Radiohead bassist Colin Greenwood also appears, adding another low-end presence to music that often feels as though it is being pushed forward by collective momentum.

The title track moves with almost processional force, Cave’s voice surrounded by a band that seems to keep enlarging the emotional frame. “Frogs” is similarly expansive, its repeated imagery and rising arrangement turning beauty into something unstable. “Long Dark Night” pulls the scale back and allows Cave’s storytelling voice to carry more of the weight. Across the album, gospel-like choral textures and Ellis’s atmospheric instincts meet a rock band willing to sound physical again.

Cave has said that the chaotic joy of touring in 2022 fed into the record, and that connection between performer and ensemble is crucial. Wild God does not erase the sombre territory of his recent work; it discovers movement inside it. That is why the large arrangements feel earned rather than bombastic. Listen to the way individual instruments disappear into massed sound, then re-emerge around the vocal. The album’s central pleasure is communal: not a lone figure finding an answer, but a room of musicians making uncertainty feel survivable.