Nick Cave & The Bad Seeds

Since the ‘70s, Australian songwriter Nick Cave has built a body of work by turns terrifying, swaggering, tender, and spiritual. Cave was born in 1957 in Warracknabeal and eventually headed to art school for painting in 1976. The following year, he dropped out and formed cacophonous post-punk group The Birthday Party. In the wake of their breakup in 1983, Cave started The Bad Seeds, with whom he has explored his own life and major influences—American rock ‘n’ roll and The New Testament in particular—through vicious gothic punk (their 1984 debut, From Her to Eternity), ornate piano ballads (1997’s The Boatman’s Call), and orchestral rock (2013’s Push the Sky Away). In 2019, he released the monumental, symphonic Ghosteen, an album filled with the presence of his son Arthur, who died aged 15 in 2015. Ghosteen was the clearest expression of a major shift in Cave’s sound, which he has expanded upon with his closest collaborator, multi-instrumentalist Warren Ellis. Together, they’ve worked on numerous film scores and 2021’s hallucinatory CARNAGE, on which Cave continued to confront grief, faith, and hope.