Nick Cave

Over the course of two decades, Nick cave established himself as one of the most outstanding voices of rock music. His songs are filled with ancient curses and overflow with universal tragedy. All of his music is pervasive with the sense of an imminent apocalypse, but at the same time it is liberated by an almost illuminating faith in a supernatural entity. Blues and country are exalted to hights worthy of classical music.

Nick Cave rose to prominence in the early 1980s as the rebellious singer of one of the most radical groups of punk rock: Birthday Party. The first recording by Nick Cave and his friend Mick Harvey were with a band named The Boys Next Door: the single These Boots Are Made For Walking in 1978, soon followed by the album Door Door the next year. The Boys Next Door mutated into The Birthday Party in 1980 for the eponymous album and moved from Australia to London.

After leaving that punk band, Nick Cave assembled a group called Bad Seeds with German guitarist Blixa Bargeld (of Einsturzende Neubaten ), English bassist Barry Adamson (of Magazine) and Mick Harvey on drums (of Birthday Party).

Continuing the moral and musical program of the last Birthday Party recordings, From Her to Eternity (Mute, 1984) elevated Cave to preacher of the moral apocalypse.
Across the album’s tracks, his rasp unfolds as a kind of expressionist odyssey in a nightmare atmosphere crafted through a careful balance of sounds teetering on the edge of dissonance. The manifesto of this new direction is the grotesque, self-titled psychodrama, where paranoid crooning collides with absolute negation in a pounding tribalism of piano and bass drum. Cave identifies himself with myths of the past and wreaks sacrilegious devastation on literary myths (Saint Huck, centered on Huckleberry Finn, a convulsive recitation amid funereal piano tolls, sheet-metal rhythms, and whistling). He intones dark, blasphemous pirate chants bordering on the most spectral, hysterical gospel (Well Of Misery). He revels in rollicking funk ricocheting on TNT-like cadences (Cabin Fever). He chisels sinister lieder that exaggerate the desperate fairy tales of cursed singer-songwriters like John Cale (A Box For Black Paul, with recitative singing, cocktail-lounge piano, and distant reverberations of psychedelic-blues guitar).
The insistent rhythms of these tracks still evoke occult rituals, but now those cadences are fragmented and broken by a sharper neurosis. Cave (a drug addict) sings like a caged beast, producing swoons of maniacal depression halfway between punk invective, the final gasp of a dying man, and the scream of a madman.

The process of regression toward the song form, already begun on the last Birthday Party records, reaches completion here. Cave proves himself a master of essentiality: the reference genres are stripped down to only the necessary chords and beats. The result is a sense of desolation and decay, of solitude, and ultimately of death. It is a work oppressed more than ever by the dark atmosphere of a fatal overdose. Here Cave establishes himself as one of the greatest modern blues singers and the most magical shaman since Jim Morrison.

The Firstborn Is Dead (Homestead, 1985), the second Bad Seeds album, is the record that best represents Cave’s gothic vein, heightening the blues tones of his moans and setting them in a mythical America of desperadoes and misery, somewhere between the Frontier and the Depression. The lyrics take on the form of imaginary biography: from an authentic event in some famous life Cave draws parables of hallucinatory fervor.
Master of the sordid and the thriller, Cave fuses them explosively in his typical homicidal ballads (“murder ballads”): in the spectral Say Goodbye To The Little Girl Tree, a lustful satyr commits suicide to suppress his desire for a child. A lycanthropic howl and a locomotive rhythm launch Train Long-suffering into visceral gospel, with the typical call-and-response scheme that feeds on itself and grows in exasperation. Another gospel with choir is Black Crow King, in the gloomy style befitting a sinister messiah (who, in a fit of megalomania, raises here a solemn “glory” to himself). The most anguished and interior of his blues is Knocking On Joe, a subdued lament in which a prisoner proclaims that his many sufferings have made him invulnerable to pain. But the apex is perhaps reached in the mournful requiem of Blind Lemon Jefferson, in which his sick mind relives the last minutes of the great blind bluesman’s life: a sonic slow-motion in which everything seems to stop and fade away.
Tupelo merges the dark fantasies of a frenzied jungle talking-blues, the sinister martiality of pseudo-rockabilly tribalism, the archaic mythology of the Gospels, and the arcane wail of the psyche of this obscene, apostate, criminal poet (whose “King of Heaven,” born in Tupelo, is of course Presley, a rock transfiguration of Jesus). His preferred milieu is that of a B-movie America, reflected in the music, which recycles the “cheap” sounds of the past.

Cave dusts off the semiotic arsenal of the bluesmen—from the railroad ballad to the prison ballad, from the Bible to the vernacular—and assigns to all of it a mythological emphasis. In doing so, he grants the blues a lyrical and metaphysical, if not prophetic, status, akin to what another great visionary, William Blake, conferred upon Protestant sermons.

The transitional phase is dotted with metaphorical records. Kicking Against The Pricks (Homestead, 1986), a collection of classics from the 1920s twisted into extremely degraded arrangements, is his homage to his own musical roots. The double EP Your Funeral My Trial (Homestead, 1986) exalts his biblical/decadent metaphysics and his visionary/cursed ego, returning to the form of the narrative ballad but in a more serene style: Sad Waters could be one of the folk-rock serenades from Dylan’s Blonde On Blonde, with Kooper on organ; the Tom Waits–like ballad Your Funeral sinks into an icy pathos worthy of Brassens; the raga Jack’s Shadow indulges in his typical tribal cadences only to soar into an epic croon. Even Hard On For Love, wallowing in a colossal obsession with obscene demonism to the feverish rhythm of Suicide, is a voodoobilly that is more and more “voodoo” and less “billy.” Arranged in an almost comical way are the horror waltz of Carny, with the martial gait of a “Zappa-esque” ballet performed by an orchestra of androids, and She Fell Away, which bursts into a Cossack crescendo worthy of Camper Van Beethoven—as if Cave, having reached the terminal point of his Odyssey, were parodying himself.

Cave spent the following year detoxing from heroin and completing his first work of fiction. Meanwhile, the Bad Seeds lineup changed, with Adamson leaving and Kid Congo Powers joining, and with Harvey’s artistic growth as he became guitarist and keyboardist.

Tender Prey (Mute, 1988) is an album arranged even more professionally by Harvey, with a greater presence of keyboards (him) and guitar (Congo Powers). For his part, Nick Cave accentuates his intensely religious longing. Cave is fundamentally a mad preacher, whose purgatorial despair blends with a country/blues paganism full of Eros and Evil. On the record still hover dark Robert Johnson–style chants with pirate choruses, drunken cadences, and apocalyptic Blakean lyrics (Up Jumped The Devil), lugubrious Witches’ Night tribalisms with the most demonic inflections since Crowley (City Of Refuge, Sugar Sugar Sugar), skeletal nightclub ballads à la Waits (Watching Alice), but also a heartfelt spiritual in which tribalism underpins intensely religious harmonica and piano (Mercy), a mournful symbolic ballad à la Cohen (Sunday's Slave), a languid hymn from a possessed fundamentalist (New Morning), and more serene compositions that overturn the austere formula of earlier times (the refrain, the organ, and the surf cadence of Deanna). Mercy Seat, the climax of the rosary, is a gospel nursery rhyme accelerated into a vertiginous crescendo in the neurasthenic style of Suicide.

This Nick Cave "reborn Christian", no longer a martyr of adolescent nihilism, longs for an auteur cabaret à la Tom Waits, but without the encyclopedic genius of the Los Angeles master, and for a ballad of redemption à la Cohen, but without the lyrical genius of the Canadian. The pantheon of his heroes is made up of illustrious corpses (Jefferson, Presley, Dylan), yet they belong to a past difficult to reconcile with the present. Cave transforms from a disturbing shaman into a visionary revisionist, and, not coincidentally, from a rhythm-and-blues shouter into a baritone of country or gospel.
Cave remains, however, one of the few musicians to have grasped the dramaturgical quality (Box, Blind Lemon Jefferson, Your Funeral) and the ritualistic quality (From Her, Saint Huck, Tupelo, Train Long Suffering, Jacks Shadow, Hard On, Mercy Seat) of the blues, and to have emphasized them to the point of creating two abstract, complementary idioms within the same poetics of universal pain. The desperate atmospheres of his existential psalms fuse the moral universes of punk and folk, resolving that apparent contradiction in the most agonizing way. An emulation of the masters of Southern Gothic (Faulkner, O’Connor), Cave is also one of the few rock musicians to write lyrics worth reading.

The natural progression toward a fuller, more grandiose sound reaches its peak with Good Son (Elektra, 1990), an album arranged in an almost symphonic manner. He is surrounded by his trusted companions Bargeld, Powers, and Harvey. The record chiefly marks the conquest of a classical style, one that transcends the genres it draws from and communicates universally beyond the literal meaning of the lyrics.
The solemn notes of Foi Na Cruz lift one of his most heartfelt anthems over delicate guitar strumming, aching organ chords, and the majestic notes of the piano—a gospel of redemption worthy of missionary monks. The choir supports Cave in the chorus, and the violins propel the grand finale. It is one of the most moving moments of his career.
Good Son opens with an a cappella spiritual choir, but soon guitar and drums impose a dizzying rhythm, and Cave begins to unfold his parable in a furious register. The narrative alternates anguished crescendos from stormy sounds with desolate laments and gentle violin strokes. Six minutes of pure delirium, yet also of heartfelt pain. Now genuflected, bent over himself, the preacher intones Sorrow's Child, a funeral prayer of desperate desolation that seems to stretch, with slow and majestic melody, toward the kingdom of heaven.
Cave finds the strength to move forward with the same tragic cadence into dark, ancestral atmospheres, imbued with that oppressive sense of sinister mystery that has always been his greatest weapon. The tracks unfold like a series of dark ceremonies, culminating in Weeping Song, whose sparse accompaniment relies almost entirely on a voodoo cadence.
Cave hurls all the rage and desire for revenge weighing on his soul into the overwhelming gospel of Witness Song, propelled by a powerful organ roll, hand claps, and a bass choir. Within the simple structure of this song, Cave displays the full theatricality of his performance art.
Cave is, above all, a master author-director-actor of dramaturgical texts, with a meticulous attention to spatial staging. He is well supported by his companions: Bargeld and Powers conjure the noir atmosphere of Hammer Song with just a few calculated touches, before the orchestra overwhelms it with exotic echoes worthy of "Casablanca."
Finally, there are the melodies, which in many ways are the protagonists of this album. Cave has developed harmonic classicism that balances composure and fervor. The most touching melodies emerge naturally from the way he carries the song. The melody rises proud and martial in Ship Song, revealing the vision that animates the singer; and in the middle of Lament, one of the most romantic melodies of his career soars, worthy of Broadway artisans. This antiquated melodicism, paired with the equally antiquated gospel, contributes to a sense of universal tragedy, of a need for catharsis, of a universal judgment that feels both urgent and imminent.

The rhythmic drive of that album, and the way the rhythm conveys his personal Calvary, are practically unrepeatable, and indeed Henry's Dream (Elektra, 1992) does not even attempt to replicate them. Although the album revisits the same themes, Cave is content to stage his heartfelt gospels in film-noir atmospheres. His dramatic art is at its peak, virtually infallible in weaving tension-filled atmospheres of pure thriller, and in releasing that tension through long sermons shaken by his powerful baritone. The Bad Seeds, for their part, are so tight, composed, and precise that they seem more like a chamber ensemble than a rock band. Mick Harvey on rhythm guitar (co-author of many arrangements), Blixa Bargeld on lead guitar, Conway Savage on piano, Martin Casey on bass, and Thomas Wydler on drums form the exceptional cast of this sacred performance.
The music itself is, however, extremely simple and linear. In Papa Won't Leave You, Henry, a calculated string section effect in nervous crescendo launches the drums and choir into one of their overwhelming gospels, while the voice writhes in screams and moans to fully convey the anguish of the story, and the rhythm (driven by all instruments) grows ever more relentless. I Had A Dream, Joe opens with a choir singing the main chorus in a funereal tone, then Cave erupts hysterically and furiously in his prophetic harangue, and it is practically only his fervor that sustains the song. As always, his greatness lies chiefly in knowing how to make these simple songs explode: the whispered prayer of Brother, My Cup Is Empty becomes another overwhelming cry of despair, even deforming into demonic tones.
Equally important for the success of the songs is the dynamics. When I First Came To Town begins as a country ballad but soon becomes a dark symphony. From that lush, somber sound arises John Finn's Wife, which, sung with less fervor, could serve as a Hollywood soundtrack, complete with piano romance and “French” melody. Christina The Astonishing even displays a pathos and melodicism akin to a Renaissance song. In another of his most inspired moments, Cave intones the serenade of Straight To You in the most epic register, whose jangling guitar and atmospheric organ seem to come straight from Blonde On Blonde.
Always funereal, even in the most agitated moments, Cave performs his acts of contrition with the air of a recidivist sinner. A tormented soul beyond all suffering, he flounders in the certainty that redemption will never be within reach—heroic and pathetic, lost forever in the labyrinths of his lucid madness, with a heart bleeding a mix of pain and hate. Musically, he remains essentially a hybrid of Jim Morrison, Leonard Cohen and Warren Zevon; as an individual, he increasingly embodies a cross between the medieval Faustus and any frontier charlatan preacher.
Henry's Dream tends to indulge in emphasis and rhetoric in a verbose manner that works against it, diminishing or entirely neutralizing the emotional impact of his singing.
His obsession with the Deep South of the United States, with stories of passion and death in blues and country, infuses all of his art. In some way, that paranoia seems rooted in a form of identification—at once elegantly postmodern and darkly morbid—with the hagiography of Elvis Presley, reimagined in the most overtly romantic, telenovela-like manner. The existence of the “king” becomes a parable of life and death that transcends biographical reality to sink into a paradoxical theological delirium, as if part of the Old Testament, and a pretext through which, in some twisted way, Cave’s subconscious relives his own autobiography as if it had occurred in hell.

The same allegorical quality, the same biblical iconography, the same hallucinatory setting, the same horror/desire for violence also permeate the novel And The Ass Saw The Angel, a horror/thriller that is, all in all, unsuccessful, afflicted by the worst excesses of Jim Thompson’s novels and George Romero’s films, and useful only for a deeper understanding of his unsettling psyche (Mick Harvey and Ed Clayton-Jones would later score some passages recited by Cave on a namesake album that also collects the soundtrack of a theatrical adaptation of the novel).

An unparalleled storyteller, Cave continues refining an art built on the dramaturgical qualities of gospel, once stripped of its ritual apparatus. These later albums, obsessed with the theme of criminality, trace a tireless parabola (or Calvary) toward a music of redemption.

Meanwhile, Cave has left Berlin and taken up residence in Sao Paulo.

The strength of the courtly songbook in Let Love In (Elektra, 1994) is also its weakness: Cave is far too much a “narrator.” He presents himself in a series of traumatic panels. By constantly speaking about himself through allegories and metaphors, Cave ends up forgetting that he is recording a music album. A slow metamorphosis is underway, during which Cave is losing control over his expressive means.
The accompaniments have something antiquated, like the piano music box and, in general, the film-noir atmosphere of Do You Love Me (one of the album’s high points) or the silent-movie organ in Red Right Hand; yet his preacher-like verve and otherworldly crooning remain front and center in yet another apocalyptic gospel, I Let Love In, and in the driving country-rock of Thirsty Dog, which is arguably the most confessional track of the work. Loverman, Jangling Jack, and Ain’t Gonna Rain Anymore crown his most romantic album.
Cave, renowned for the composure he maintains in moments of intense pain, allows himself a few hysterical outbursts, which come almost as comfort—a confirmation of humanity: Loverman, the supreme demonstration of his over-the-top acting skills, and Jangling Jack, imbued with “luciferian” malice. This man, accustomed to strolling casually along the edge of an abyss, finally betrays a shiver of fear. Perhaps also because, having abandoned the role of offscreen voice, in this album Cave is the protagonist of the stories he sings.

The twelve allegorical Murder Ballads (Reprise, 1996) exaggerate to the grotesque the sickly hues of his theater. Gothic and expressionism soften into a sometimes overly exposed romanticism, as if the man, aging, were moved a bit too easily. Whereas the calm fatalism of Good Son built emotion from a few notes suspended in a sparse parabola, now Cave indulges at every turn in all the tricks of his trade. Perhaps his anguished art as a jester of the underworld and prophet of the slums has become courtly routine.
The “backgrounds” end up becoming protagonists. After all, a band made up of Mick Harvey (guitar), Blixa Bargeld (guitar), Jim Sclavunos (drums), and Conway Savage (piano) has few rivals in the world. Song Of Joy is anything but that: Cave tells his story over a fairly free background of oppressive chords, unsettling piano lines, and claustrophobic minimalism. Lovely Creature drives forward at a train-like pace, sustained by solemn interwoven piano figures, frantic drum rolls, and a counterpoint of nursery-rhyme-like chants. O’Malley’s Bar (fourteen minutes) accentuates his verbosity—which is not necessarily a virtue—and perhaps attempts to probe the wounds of his moral crucifixion in search of the absolute masterpiece he has been seeking for years.
The tragic, sinister, and malevolent touch that suits him best reappears only in Stagger Lee, though between the lines one can read the martial steps of Weill’s cabaret. It is therefore no surprise to hear Cave humming like a showgirl in the “can-can” of The Curse Of Millhaven.
A poignant waltz in the style of Leonard Cohen forms the framework of Where The Wild Roses Grow, a duet with Kylie Minogue that unfolds at the funeral pace of a string orchestra and funeral bells, representing the romantic peak of the album.
A transitional work, it adds little to his repertoire and is unusually easy to listen to.

The senile Cave of Boatman’s Call (Reprise, 1997), immersed to the point of paranoia in his clichés and determined to fully carry out his self-pitying parabola, has its own charm. Musically, it adds nothing new to his main repertoire, yet a hundred years from now there will still be those who weep listening to the pathetic romances of his later years. This time, not even the skill of the backing band (which, in truth, is almost always secondary to his piano) can save him from shipwreck: the album is an almost self-parodic exaggeration of his entire career. It has its allure, but it is the same allure as a maddened Hölderlin in his tower.
Equally senile is the relentless return to religious themes, as if death were just around the corner and Cave were consumed by the terror of perdition. Into My Arms and There Is A Kingdom are thus worthy of a televangelist.
The central theme is love, just as death was the pivot of the previous album; but it is a love that causes endless pain, since every song resembles a bitter outpouring of tears. The song sequence is a gradual descent into an increasingly bare and intimate sound, passing through the heartfelt laments of Black Hair and Far From Me to reach the almost silent psalm of Green Eyes. The shadow of Leonard Cohen stretches over these courteous songs.
At the same time, whether to reveal his influence or because inspiration guides him there, Dylan’s music is ever more present. The same fatalistic intertwining of death and love was a cornerstone of Dylan’s metaphysics. On People Ain’t No Good, one almost hears the Dylan of Blonde On Blonde, only a bit darker.
It is certainly the most solemn album of his career, perhaps also the most serious, and perhaps the most personal. Yet it is also perhaps the least musical. It is difficult to foresee where this mood might take the most literate musician in rock: as the title of one of these “cries” asks, Where Do We Go Now But Nowhere?

If the last few albums have been somewhat inferior to the previous ones, and in particular the most recent shows signs of fatigue—or at least a tendency to “narrate” (and to tell increasingly elaborate stories) rather than make music—Cave’s tormented soul has found a temporary peace in the “visual” music of the Bad Seeds, whose style owes much to that of Ennio Morricone, not coincidentally another great storyteller through sound.

Distracted by several non-musical activities, Cave returned to music four years after the last studio album. No More Shall We Part (Mute, 2001) is a collection of majestic piano-based elegies that futher remove him from the bombastic and forceful style of Good Son and sail towards the sparse and delicate style of Leonard Cohen. In a sense, it is the "feminine" and charitable soul of Cave that is slowly taking over his male and devilish soul. Even the voice has changed, from the emphatic call to arms of the preacher to the gentle croon of the gigolo. The usual dose of mystery and tenderness permeates As I Sat Sadly By Her Side (sung in a decadent register that would be more appropriate to Bowie or Ferry), the sublime and agonizing God Is In The House. Especially poignant are the love ballads: No More Shall We Part (one of his purest melodies), Love Letter, Sweetheart Come, and the closing, heart-broken confession of Darker With the Day.
What is missing is Cave's voice, that terrifying, Biblical deluge of harsh tones. Also missing is the spectacular keyboards-driven sound of his classic years, replaced by a skeletal filigree of piano and guitar notes.
Paralleling his relocation from Jim Morrison's hell to Leonard Cohen's purgatory, Cave's approach to music shifted from the theatrical (haunting gothic tales like Fifteen Feet of Pure White Snow, tense dramas like The Sorrowful Wife, and gospel sermons like Oh My Lord) to the cinematic (Hallelujah, a gripping, seven-minute parable of an artist aging alone, punctuated by a mournful violin). As he reaches deeper and deeper into his soul, Cave's music is undergoing a linear transformation. No surprise that the Bad Seeds could hardly be heard. The McGarrigle Sisters and Warren Ellis provide most of the accompaniment that matters. The melodies may be more refined than the ones on Boatman's Call, and at least Darker With the Day, No More Shall We Part and God Is In The House truly hypnotize, but the execution is getting less and less impressive: songs drag on forever, every other motif is a dejavu, arrangements are predictable, the voice is a ghost of what it used to be. Cave, a master of disguise and certainly one of rock's best poets ever, can't even shock with the lyrics anymore: now his texts are mere affected mannerism, a virtuoso showing off his rare skills to a crowd of ecstatic paesants.

Still obsessed with the existential phantoms that have haunted all his career, Nick Cave finally managed to give them a poignant, terrifying face on Nocturama (Mute, 2003). Cave's albums had become a habit, and sometimes a vice. Their somber philosophical parables had become as predictable as an earthquake in California. Cave must have decided to get his fans' attention again by unleashing an unusual fury. Despite the low-key and apparently friendly approach of most songs (and the classic-sounding piano accompaniment), particularly of the lengthy elegiac Wonderful Life (the closest he ever sounded to Bob Dylan), of the tenderly pastoral She Passed By My Window, and of the hopelessly romantic He Wants You, the album is a postcard from hell. The songs that leave behind the routine of gothic/epic, funereal/grand music reveal Cave as the man of passion that he has always been: the ghastly atmosphere of Dead Man in My Bed, a "murder ballad" on boogie speed, and the 15-minute Babe I'm on Fire, which is a Latin-tinged epileptic version of Neil Young and the Crazy Horse's madman jams. Nick Cave's piano, Blixa Bargeld's steel guitar, and Warren Ellis's violin work wonders on the arrangements. The highlights are so impressive that one can forgive Cave the infectious power-pop of Bring It On, the waltzing singalong of Rock of Gibraltar, the almost easy-listening shuffle of Right Out Of Your Head, and the other self-indulgent songs of the album. Classic Cave is no longer an attraction (rather a tedious repetition) but occasionally he reveals glimpses of a different Cave who, at this point in his life and career, could be much more interesting.

Abattoir Blues and The Lyre of Orpheus (Mute, 2004) contain only a fraction of the music recorded in january 2004 by Nick Cave and his Bad Seeds (with James Johnson of Gallon Drunk replacing Blixa Bargeld, and with the addition of a gospel choir). The dreary martial (but musically monotonous) Abattoir Blues ranks with the apocalyptic literature of the Australian bard, but this time it sounds more "post-apocalypse" than "intra-apocalypse": it is as if Cave were contemplating the ruins, not describing the eruption; the venom and the fury of days past replaced by somber acceptance. It's like a wise old man, after the catastrophe, telling his children "I told you so". Nonetheless, the parables are framed between two frantically ebullient deliria: Get Ready For Love, the "blackest" he has ever sounded, a soul shouter old style in a thundering barrelhouse band, and There She Goes My Beautiful World, a hyperkinetic funk machine with female gospel choir. Musically, the range of styles is broader than usual: from the funereal spiritual-reggae Fable Of The Brown Ape via the anthemic refrain embedded in rude country-rock of Let The Bells Ring to the melodic peak of Nature Boy, a sprightly catchy ditty.
The Lyre of Orpheus is, instead, a cycle of elegies that has few precedents in Cave's discography. Musically, it again spreads all over the spectrum, from the agonizing blues of The Lyre of Orpheus to the gospel-ish singalong Carry Me via the frantic Supernaturally. The two lengthy songs (the derelict Easy Money and the Neil Young-ian cry O Children with a female gospel choir) are too verbose. Meanwhile Cave keeps flirting with mainstream music: the slow-motion serenade Babe You Turn Me On, and especially the Caribbean shuffle Breathless (another melodic peak of this phase).

B-Sides and Rarities (Mute, 2005) is a triple-CD anthology of Cave's lesser artistic output.

Nick Cave and the Dirty Three's violinist Warren Ellis composed the soundtracks for the films The Proposition (Mute, 2005), The Assassination of Jesse James (2007), The Road (2010), The Girls of Phnom Penh, The English Surgeon as well as for theatrical productions of Woyzeck (2005) and Metamorphosis (2006). This music was later collected on the double-disc White Lunar (Mute, 2009).

Nick Cave's first major film script, The Proposition (2005), was directed by John Hillcoat.

Abandoning the piano for the electric guitar, Cave's new project Grinderman (Anti, 2007) signaled the end of an era. While the album still used the Bad seeds, the sound (not to mention the lust) harked back to the cacophonous frenzy of the Birthday Party. Cave and his cohorts release primal energy of an almost punkish intensity. Get It On is paradigmatic: tension built by a-cappella declamation, enhanced by metallic piano tones and swampy Rolling Stones-ian polyrhythm, but never released in a chorus worthy of that name. No Pussy Blues is more recitation than singing, propelled by scant accompaniment until a devastating guitar feedback suddenly erupts. The frenzied Honey Bee charges ahead with fibrillating distorted organ and panzer rhythm. Depth Charge Ethel would be a blend of rock'n'roll and doo-wop, like Bruce Springsteen fronting the Standells, if they played it straight, but both singer and band are incapable of traditional structures. The brooding When my Love Comes Down overflows with instrumental noise. And the album closes with a slab of morbid and driving garage-rock, Love Bomb.
Cave's traditional (adult?) side permeates the exotic Electric Alice, the Bob Dylan-ian Set Me Free, the elegiac Leonard Cohen-ian Man in the Moon, songs that would be major items on any of his previous albums but here almost sound out of context.
A rejuvinated bard adopted the stance of the demonic pervert and found a new mission in life.

Dig Lazarus Dig (Mute, 2008), the second Bad Seeds album without Blixa Bargeld (and therefore dominated by Warren Ellis on violin, Mick Harvey on guitar and Jim Sclavunos on drums), weds Cave's blasphemous lyrics (surprisingly decadent, actually) to a solid musical romp. Occasionally verbose (the Lou Reed-ian chronicle of More News From Nowhere), the album peaks with the satanic and rousing Albert Goes West (very much in the Grinderman vein and even more melodic), the harrowing swamp-blues of Night of the Lotus Eaters, the emphatic and Latin-tinged Dig Lazarus Dig and Midnight Man. The band's performance is rowdy and edgy, as if Grinderman had revitalized everybody, not just Cave. The most unusual song is probably Hold On To Yourself, a relaxed summery guitar shuffle covered with digital noise. A close second is the lyrical litany Jesus of the Moon, that relies on a complex albeit subdued accompaniment.

Grinderman 2 (2010) is a swaggering, blaring and degrading vanity show. There are moments of brilliance. Mickey Mouse And The Goodbye Man provides a crunchy guitar and a boogie rhythm for a howling Nick Cave. The thundering and tense Worm Tamer conceals a catchy refrain that could be from the Merseybeat era. More dubious are the outcomes of the single Heathen Child, a pornographic vision that musically sits somewhere between cacophonous gospel and frenzied blues, and When My Baby Comes (the longest track) that grinds slowly through a swampy equatorial beat and amid violin wails before the fall into hell of the coda, which is reminiscent of the hypnotic blues ruminations of Led Zeppelin's first album. The man who has been plagiarized by legions of singers is caught plagiarizing the Rolling Stones' Sympathy for the Devil in Palaces Of Montezuma. So much is predictable about these songs that the closer, Bellringer Blues, makes news because it smothers Cave's most whipping recitation into a thick layer of shoegazing guitar and sound effects, probably the single smartest idea of this album. Obviously, this is not a highly inspired singer-songwriter but an artist stuck in a routine who mostly revisits his past career with the class of the veteran entertainer. When old people try to rock harder than young people, it's a sign of terminal aging. Even the lyrics seem to simply copy and paste old lyrics: the 1000th lascivious reference to morbid sex or the 500th blasphemous reference to the Bible are not exactly thrilling.

Push The Sky Away (2013) was the first Bad Seeds album without Mick Harvey (replaced by George Vjestica), and one of the weakest, despite the seven-minute litany Higgs Boson Blues, halfway between Bruce Springsteen and Lou Reed, and despite Jubilee Street, which is basically its less attractive sister. The mellow ballad We No Who U R and the ghostly We Real Cool don't do justice to Cave. The electronic ambience of the album does little to modernize his music.

Cave's 15-year-old son Arthur died during the recording of Skeleton Tree (Bad Seed, 2016) and the album sounds almost like a requiem to his son. It is certainly better than its predecessor, but about half of it is still disposable. The Bad Seeds provide little more than a subdued accompaniment: Warren Ellis, Martyn Casey (bass), Thomas Wydler (drums), Jim Sclavunos (percussion, vibraphone, tubular bells), and George Vjestica (guitar). Cave is the master atmosphere sculptor and he can still pull out the skeletal, funereal and apocalyptic Jesus Alone and especially Magneto, a song in which the music seems to die in an atmosphere that is beyond ghostly, not quite macabre but certainly death-evoking. But the obsessively sedate tone of Rings Of Saturn and similar anemic songs doesn't elevate his streams of consciousness to art. The band wakes up in Anthrocene, but it's too little and too late, and even a bit amateurish. There are weak echoes of the old demonic Cave in Girl In Amber, which ends up sounding like a somnolent version of Patti Smith, and the lively (by these standards) Skeleton Tree intones an organ-driven Pink Floyd-ian hymn that towards the end morphs into a children's singalong, which makes it the rare dynamic song at his point in his career. The melodic peak is a shivering cry over a massive electronic drone: I Need You (one of the few tracks here that is actually a song, not just a recitation). The emotional peak is the tender Distant Sky, thanks to the gentle female vocals (Danish opera singer Else Torp) that seem to embrace the entire universe. His faint voice belongs to an old tradition of introverted singer-songwriters to adopt the crawling pace of a dying man, a tradition that stretches back to Leonard Cohen; and it could be that Cave is indirectly reinventing Nick Drake for the generation that never even heard that name. The prophet of doom and gloom has been humbled by the universe.

Lovely Creatures (2017) is a career retrospective.

Conway Savage died in 2018.

In 2019, asked what the voice of God sounds like, Cave replied: "Perhaps, God would have the combined voice of all the untold billions of collected souls, an assembly of the departed speaking as one -- without rancour, domination or division, a great, many-layered calling forth that rings from the heavens in the small, determined voice of a child, maybe; sexless, pure and uncomplicated -- that says 'Look for me. I am here.'"

The electronic double-disc Ghosteen (2019), the 17th album or so with the Bad Seeds, recorded after his son's death but mostly written before it, is really a collaboration with Dirty Three's violinist Warren Ellis. If you are interested in the lyrics, the songs may be mildly interesting, but otherwise the music is buried in Ellis' mostly electronic arrangements The other Bad Seeds can barely be heard at all. We know that Thomas Wylder's drummer and Martyn Casey's bass are there only because they are listed in the liner notes. Jim Sclavunos' percussion is reduced to an input to Ellis' computer program. Spinning Song, a tedious spoken-word tribute of sorts to Elvis Presley, and Night Raid, another half-spoken piece simply constitute an Ellis exercise in digital soundsculpting Sun Forest, yet another half-spoken track, begins as a new-age instrumental, and it's a relief when at the end it intones a sad singalong in a falsetto register that doesn't sound like Nick Cave at all (why not invert the sequence?) In the twelve-minute Ghosteen Cave's vocals are largely disposable (and non-existent for the first five minutes before a brief magniloquent choral crescendo): this is a Warren Ellis symphonic poem.
It is hard to salvage any song. Bright Horses blends a transcendent wail, dejected choir and solemn piano. Cave croons the old-fashioned pop aria of Waiting For You over slow piano notes. The album's standout is Ghosteen Speaks, the one song that boasts a poignant melody, that keeps the electronics at arm's length, and achieves the intensity of a requiem (or of a Buddhist mantra, or of a plantation song) in a truly "ghostly" atmosphere worthy of Leonard Cohen, even though the choir is a bit corny. Cave's recitation is truly affecting also in the fourteen-minute Hollywood that retells the the Buddhist legend of Kisa Gotami, although the real protagonist is the suspense-filled dialogue between the percussion and the keyboards.
This album is, in general, sedate to the point of being lethargic. Cave without the demonic charge of Witness is not much of a singer, and the Bad Seeds are merely the ghost of the original lineup. The excessive electronic arrangements even make Cave's grief sound insincere. Eventually, even the lyrics begin to sound irrelevant: "It's a long way to find peace of mind, and I'm just waiting now for my time to come". Yawn.

Nick Cave and multi-instrumentalist Warren Ellis became prolific composers of film soundtracks: Lawless (2012), West Of Memphis (2014), Loin Des Hommes (2015), Hell Or High Water (2016), Mars (2017), Wind River album (2017), War Machine (2017), Kings (2018), etc. They also recorded the weak Carnage (Goliath, 2021) in a slightly more menacing mood and with a lot more variety than Ghosteen. White Elephant begins with the recitation of a surrealist poem and then turns into a singalong, the same strategy used by Donovan for Atlantis about 50 years earlier. The pulsating and orchestral Hand of God belongs to his major canon, but arias like Albuquerque belong to the tradition of Broadway showtunes A fatalistic sense of loneliness and loss emanates from Balcony Man, but Carnage sounds like an excerpt from one of his film soundtracks. There are echoes of sacre baroque music in the elegy Lavender Fields. and the nightmarish dissonance of Old Time is highly effective for the first few minutes. But that's too little to salvage the album. And his lyrics are becoming too often either repetitive or facile.

Nick Cave's 30-year-old son Jethro (a drug-addict with a history of violence) died in 2022.