Nick Cave, the prince of darkness, is back in the limelight with Ghosteen, his 17th album with The Bad Seeds.
With a running time of almost 70 minutes, the LP dropped overnight on digital music services. Its two parts form a cohesive, heartbreaking narrative.
The songs on the first set are “the children,” and those on the second “are their parents,” explains Cave. “Ghosteen is a migrating spirit.”
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Ghosteen is the followup to the Cave’s Skeleton Key, from 2016, a dark and pained album completed after a tragic accident that took his teenage son’s life.
There are no rollicking, fun-time tracks on Ghosteen. There’s no “Deanna” or “Curse of Millhaven.” This is an album etched in pain and sorrow. “Everybody’s losing someone,” he sings on album track “Hollywood.” “It’s a long way to find a piece of mind…I’m just waiting now for peace to come.”
The ARIA Hall of Famer recorded the new album with his band in 2018 and early 2019 at Woodshed in Malibu, Nightbird in Los Angeles, Retreat in Brighton and Candybomber in Berlin.
Ghosteen premiered globally Friday morning on YouTube as a haunting, album-length lyric video, directed by Tom Hingston, as listening sessions took place at independent record stores around the planet.
The vinyl and CD versions of Ghosteen will be released on Friday, Nov. 8, with pre-orders at Nickcave.com.
Cave is currently in the midst of his Conversations tour of North America, with European dates to follow from January 2020.
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Skeleton Tree is Cave’s highest-charting album in the United States, topping out at No. 27 on the Billboard 200, eclipsing the No. 29 peak of its predecessor, 2013’s Push the Sky Away.
Stream Ghosteen below.