Ghosteen by Nick Cave and the Bad Seeds

Ghosteen, the seventeenth album by Nick Cave and the Bad Seeds, came out on 4 October 2019, a double album and the closing panel of the trilogy that began with Push the Sky Away and Skeleton Tree. Cave produced it with Warren Ellis, and he wrote it in the aftermath of his son Arthur's death in 2015. The sessions took place mostly in Malibu and West Hollywood, with more work in Germany and England.

There's barely a drumbeat to hold on to. Instead, synthesizers, loops and ambient washes drift under Cave's voice, and his lyrics leave behind his earlier narrative writing for something more abstract, turning over loss, death and existence while reaching toward empathy, faith and hope. Critics met it with rare unanimity: it became the best-reviewed album of 2019 on Metacritic, and shared the decade's top score there with Kendrick Lamar's To Pimp a Butterfly.

Written with AI assistance from RockLists chart data, MusicBrainz and Wikipedia.