Nick Cave’s Transfixing Chants

The music that Nick Cave makes is often preoccupied with the unresolved. Whether fronting the short-lived Australian post-punk band the Birthday Party, working with his long-running project the Bad Seeds, or collaborating with the Bad Seeds member and multi-instrumentalist Warren Ellis, the singer-songwriter and composer has sung compellingly of death and dysfunction, in a gripping, broken-down voice that implies as much melodrama and sensitivity as acidity and malaise. Even as Cave’s sound swung dramatically from goth rock (“Your Funeral . . . My Trial,” from 1986) to moody piano (“The Boatman’s Call,” from 1997) and then garage rock (“Dig, Lazarus, Dig!!!,” from 2008), the artist found himself circling back to morbid imagery and unsustainable love, wretched characters seeking redemption that might never come—a world of endless abstractions sprung from the mind of a self-professed “young troublemaker, drug addict, chaos-maker.”

In recent years, there has been even more reason for Cave to ruminate on chaos and its reverberations, both tragic and beautiful. In 2015, his fifteen-year-old son, Arthur, died after falling from a cliff, and in 2022, after Cave had completed the interviews for his book “Faith, Hope and Carnage,” which considered loss, grief, and emerging from its fog, he lost another of his sons, Jethro. Amid these devastating tragedies, he found salvation in communing with his fans, through a recurring Q. & A. newsletter, “The Red Hand Files.”

The music he’s made with such misery in view has been hauntingly poignant and transfixing. The Bad Seeds albums released since Arthur’s death—“Skeleton Tree” (2016) and “Ghosteen” (2019)—are subtle, sweeping records of harmonic detail that draw the ear directly to Cave’s mutable chants. “Everybody’s losing someone / It’s a long way to find peace of mind / And I’m just waiting now, for my time to come / And I’m just waiting now, for peace to come,” he sings on “Hollywood,” his voice lithe, weightless. As he and the Bad Seeds prep the new album “Wild God” (out on Aug. 30), the veteran musician performs alone at National Sawdust, on Aug. 15, for the Grammy Museum’s New York City program series.