“We’ve all experienced too much pain. Now is the time to rejoice,” sings 66-year-old Nick Cave on the new record Wild God. Out today, it offers “radical optimism,” according to a review from Britain’s Guardian newspaper.
Cave returns to the news with the full line-up of his band The Bad Seeds and also with a positive energy that replaces the gloomy, darkened moods of the previous albums.
During the recording of Skeleton Tree (2016), Cave was struck by tragedy – his then fifteen-year-old son Arthur suddenly died after falling off a cliff near the singer’s house after taking LSD for the first time.
Cave coped with the tragic death on the following, dream-like record Ghosteen (2019), but also through his therapeutic newsletter The Red Hand Files. With his close collaborator Warren Ellis, he released the covid-influenced album Carnage in 2021, later also adding a book of interviews with columnist Séan O’Hagan, God, Love and Carnage.
In 2022, Cave was once again engulfed in grief. His son Jethro Lazenby died at only thirty-one.
Despite all the suffering of the last few years, Cave returns to positivity on the new record. A positivity that persists despite all suffering.
Nick Cave will also present the album Wild God in the Czech Republic. On October 17, he will play in Prague’s O2 arena. He last appeared on the Czech stage in 2022. “If I’ve ever been close to the performance of an extraterrestrial being, it was yesterday,” publicist Jan Jindřich Karásek wrote about his appearance at the Metronome festival at the time.
