Wild God

Nick Cave has spent decades cataloguing grief, desire, and transcendence with the thoroughness of someone who believes these are the only subjects worth examining, and this track finds him on the other side of catastrophic personal loss, making music that shouldn't be possible given everything that preceded it. The arrangement is vast — the Bad Seeds at their most orchestral, Warren Ellis's strings and electronics creating something that feels genuinely elemental, like weather. The tempo is processional but not funereal; there's forward momentum here, almost a kind of staggering joy that coexists with sorrow rather than replacing it. Cave's voice has aged into an instrument of remarkable authority — baritone and worn, capable of both whisper and declaration, and here he uses the full range, sometimes within a single phrase. The song reaches toward something that can only be called the sacred, not in a denominational sense but in the older meaning: things that are set apart, that demand a different quality of attention. The lyrical world is mythic and immediate simultaneously, personal grief dissolved into something archetypal. This belongs to the tradition of artists who've been broken open by experience and found, against all logic, that the opening lets in more light than was there before. You listen to this alone, and at volume, and you let it make demands on you — because music that has earned its reach deserves to be met with your full presence.