Let Love In by Nick Cave and the Bad Seeds

Let Love In, the eighth studio album from Nick Cave and the Bad Seeds, crawled out on Mute on 18 April 1994, and it sounds like a band that had spent the early '90s sanding down its edges only to find the knives still in the drawer. Tony Cohen produced, and the Melbourne-born outfit had never sounded so cinematic or so menacing: Cave croons and snarls over Blixa Bargeld's guitar shrapnel, Mick Harvey's everything-but-the-sink arrangements, Thomas Wydler's drums, Martyn P. Casey's bass and Conway Savage's piano and organ.

"Do You Love Me" is a slow-burning noir, all dread and romantic menace, and "Red Right Hand" slinks along like it's casing the joint. This is post-punk grown older and meaner, gothic rock with a gallows grin. It kept moving off the shelves, too: 50,000 copies in the US by January 1996, and British silver status, for 60,000 units, by May 2015.

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