Nick Cave & The Bad Seeds’ new album Wild God opens like a kick to the head. Not exactly like Nick’s pointy-toed Chelsea boot punt to an audience member’s face as captured in The Birthday Party’s 1982 live performance of “Release the Bats” but not as far from it as one might expect for a band that hit its 40th anniversary this year. Rather than ease into an album like the spoken intro to “Hand of God” on Nick Cave and Warren Ellis’s pandemic duo Carnage or the slow ambient roll into “Jesus Alone” and “The Spinning Song” on the Bad Seeds’ two prior albums, 2016’s Skeleton Tree and 2019’s Ghosteen, Wild God bursts open with an abrasive, near impenetrably dense and indiscernibly opaque orchestral barrage. “Song of the Lake” is a thick sludge of bonging bells, rising choir singers, soupy strings, and…is that a brass section? Mashed together by Dave Fridmann’s heavy-handed mixing, it’s like ramming headfirst into a wall of sound. And I didn’t pick that phrase at random. “Song of the Lake” sounds as if you played A Christmas Gift for You from Phil Spector at half speed (all those jingly-jangly bells demand to be heard next to a twinkling Christmas tree!). Within this muddy stew, Nick’s voice, mostly spoken until he joins the chorus in the recitation of the song’s title, not so much rises above but swims through the fog. The lyrics tell a story of an old man voyeuristically oogling a woman bathing that transforms into a fable of the pull between heaven and hell, self-shattering, listlessness, and indifference as in the dismissive refrain: “Never mind! Never mind!” This is achieved, in part, through coopting–and I can’t even believe I’m writing this–the language of Mother Goose (“All the king’s horses and all the king’s men…”).

I mean, what the fuck is this?

Even as an avowed super fan, I struggled with “Song of the Lake” on my first listen. I could immediately get with the gallant whirlpool of lovesick lift in “Final Rescue Attempt,” the sudden Sunday Service choir of the astonishing “Conversion,” and even the dubious, cringe-so-hard-you-pull-a-muscle, “Babe, You Turn Me On”-reminiscent “She rises in advance of her panties” line and literal country doctor whistle in the delightfully absurd and surprisingly vocoder-heavy, “O Wow O Wow (How Wonderful She Is),” a tribute to founding Bad Seeds member, collaborator, and Cave’s former partner Anita Lane. Mostly, with the latter, I was thrilled to hear that the band can make something that goddamn goofy after the (necessary) heaviness of the past couple of albums. Yet, it was “Song of the Lake” that slipped through my comprehension.

I should have known that with a couple more (ok, a lot more) spins of the album, “Song of the Lake” would be one of my favorites. In fact, this exact experience of a song finally clicking after a period of initial bafflement is what drew—and continues to draw—me to the Bad Seeds’ ever-evolving and fan-challenging music. Taking a trip down Bad Seeds fanatic memory lane, I strongly recall listening to the Bad Seeds’ 1988 album Tender Prey for the first time while on an Amtrak train. I was just introduced to The Boatman’s Call and afterward, I time-hopped back to Tender Prey, an album most seemed to agree was also classic Cave. “The Mercy Seat” made sense to me: Johnny Cash-inspired, prison, the electric chair, I get it. However, the subsequent “Up Jumped the Devil” unmoored me—a prowling, possessed, dancing-with-the-devil tune about a man with blood “blacker than the chambers of a dead nun’s heart” (a line I still love) that ends with the communal fall: “Down we go! Down we go!” Again, like “Song of the Lake,” what the fuck was that? “Up Jumped the Devil” had no connection with the somber piano-based singer-songwriter Cave I heard on The Boatman’s Call. I didn’t know if I liked it, but I didn’t know that I didn’t either. I had similar experiences when investigating the rest of the Bad Seeds’ discography: having to adjust my understanding and expectations with each newly heard record, whether the Southern Gothic blues Swampland of The Firstborn is Dead or the raucous blood-soaked, extensive body count on Murder Ballads. Yet I just kept listening. And listening. And listening. Until I imprinted on Cave’s discography like a baby bunny (coincidentally, rabbits leap their way through a few songs on Wild God). Part of the band’s forty years of expectation-dodging relates to Nick’s resting state of natural contrarianism, which, admittedly, has its pluses and minuses (for Christ’s sake, stop talking about how much you love Israel!). Yet it’s this constant aural challenge that brings me joy.

Wild God is an album built for this kind of bewilderment-to-adoration-pipeline joy, returning me to the foundational reason why I love the Bad Seeds just so damn much. It’s not an easy album to digest, nor is it one that can fade into the background on a casual spin. Wild God is a lot, an urgent, demanding, euphoric, sometimes to the level of overblown (not a knock—if we support nothing else on this website, it’s the overblown), swelling reach upwards towards…something…whether God or joy or a state beyond pain, all of which are evoked at length here. In contrast to the grief-stricken, pared-down, Warren Ellis-driven, synthy atmospherics of Skeleton Tree and Ghosteen, the album, as introduced by “Song of the Lake,” is a crowded, swirling morass of instruments surrounding Cave’s voice and piano, alongside a clearly well-populated choir. Hell, “Joy” even tosses in an unexpected but welcome French horn. This is not to say that the album is a complete departure from, say, Ghosteen or Carnage; it’s more of an expansive explosion outwards from those albums’ restrictions that is, then, smashed together in an ecstatic state of musical mania. Because Fridmann’s psychedelic mixing is so compressed, the ear picks up new instruments from the aural mass during each subsequent listen like George Vjestica’s guitar and Thomas Wydler’s almost militaristic drums in “Final Rescue Attempt,” Colin Greenwood’s groovy bass-line in “Frogs,” or Luis Almau’s nylon string guitar plucking underneath the cinematic orchestra in “Cinnamon Horses.” Though Fridmann’s mix has been controversial among fans and the band alike, some of whom felt, as Nick articulated on NPR, “aurally mauled” (What a phrase! I’m stealing it!), a busy mix is not without precedent in the Bad Seeds repertoire. The closest comparison is the chaotic sonic-scape of Let Love In. And while we’re on the subject of that 1994 album, I also welcome the return of its ominous tolling bells, which singularly redeem the sappy “Cinnamon Horses” (“You said that…” *BONG*).

My hangup with “Cinnamon Horses” relates to its head-scratching, dangerously close to irredeemably cheesy lyrics, featuring “cinnamon horses in the turpentine trees” and “a dozen white vampires under a strawberry moon” that also sun themselves “in the castle ruins.” I mean, what are you even talking about, Nick? To be fair, I’m not sure why I struggle with these lyrics as it also strikes me as the most Lana Del Rey song that Lana Del Rey never wrote. Just imagine her cooing, “I told my friends that life was sweet,” before hitting the vape. Can we get a cover? Like the repeated “You said that…You said that…You said that, oooh” in “Cinnamon Horses,” many of the songs contain quite simplistic lyrics (for Nick, anyway) and frequent repetitions. Both seem to be done with purpose. The simplicity mirrors Nick’s attempt to pare down his lifelong logophilia to a more basic immediacy that started around Dig!!! Lazarus Dig!!! with all those “Sha-la-la-la” and “Do you want to dance? Do you want to GROOVE?” moments on “Albert Goes West.” As for all the repetitions, they make more sense when placed in the context of Nick’s resurrection of perhaps his most gratingly monotonous song, “Black Hair,” during his 2023 solo tour with Colin Greenwood. In those performances, he introduced “Black Hair” by calling it “mantra-like,” explaining that “hopefully as the song progresses, it gathers meaning.” Many of the repetitions on Wild God work similarly, as mantras or–more Cave-ian–prayers, whether all the shouted returns to “In the Sunday rain!” in “Frogs” or the final call for “Joy, joy, joy, joy” in “Joy.”

Alongside the samey-samey, though, lies some of Cave’s most vividly hallucinatory lyrical imagery: “Joy”‘s flaming boy “in giant sneakers, laughing stars around his head” who proclaims, “We’ve all had too much sorrow, now is the time for joy”; the Goya’s The Sleep of Reason Produces Monsters-like “flying man with long trailing hair who perched upon the iron rail of my bed” in “Long Dark Night”; and the rabbits shoving carrots in their ears, the dogs yapping at their shadows, and Anita Lane’s dead friends weaving violets into her hair in “O Wow O Wow (How Wonderful She Is).” Though I have a special fondness for the crazed elation in “O Wow O Wow,” the image that has stuck with me ever since its release as a single is those itty amazed frogs that leap from the gutter towards God and fall back down into the water, still “amazed of pain,” in “Frogs.” It’s as if the frogs are experiencing a kind of filthy curbside baptism in the steady Sunday downpour.

The froggies in their dedicated song are not the only ones attaining momentary soggy salvation. From “Song of the Lake” to the concluding Protestant choral lullaby, “As the Waters Cover the Sea,” which takes its title and main line from Isaiah 11:9 (“for the earth shall be full of the knowledge of the Lord as the waters cover the sea”), Wild God is a wet (and wild) waterlogged album. Even songs without overtly drippy titles contain references to, as in “Final Rescue Attempt,” “in the rain, in the rain, and the rain, oh the rain…oh the rain.” All the splishy-splashy baptism imagery is fitting as nearly every song recounts some type of saving: the old man finding a mythic lake heaven in “Song of the Lake,” the retelling of St. John of the Cross’s “Dark Night of the Soul” in “Long Dark Night,” and Jesus stepping out from the tomb to bring “peace and good tidings to the land” in “As the Waters Cover the Sea.” Not all of the saving has to do with capital G-god. For example, “Final Rescue Attempt” is a saving by romantic rescue (“The last time you came around here, it was to rescue me”). And not all the baptisms are by water either. “Conversion” sparks a toasty baptism by fire with the infectiously maddening choral howls of “Touched by the spirit! Touched by the flame!” that sound straight out of Ye’s Donda. Of all of the many albums of hymns, the Bad Seeds have finally made a born-again album, veering straight towards Dylan’s Christian period. Hallelujah!

Yet it would be a mistake to understand Wild God as some sort of Christian rock built for a mega-church. Like Dylan, there are many other savior-like wild gods venerated here, in particular longtime musical inspirations who are prayed and paid tribute to through lyrical and aural nods. For instance, Cave’s hollering “You’re beautiful! You’re beautiful!” that slices through the “Conversion” choir is pure Bowie’s “Rock ’n’ Roll Suicide,” making plain the more subtle Ziggy Stardust moment I previously heard—and wrote about—in the title song, “Wild God.” Bowie was a powerful influence on teenage Cave, including his ill-advised high school glam rock period, yet nobody looms as large in Bad Seeds-dom quite like Elvis Presley (alongside, of course, Johnny Cash). The King haunts the twangy “Long Dark Night,” specifically Presley’s country-ish albums like Promised Land and Today. (The latter features Presley’s crooning version of “Green, Green Grass of Home,” a lyric of which Cave cribbed for his own “Sad Waters” off of 1986’s Your Funeral…My Trial.) Late-stage Presley’s defiantly bellowing vocals also inform Nick’s booming delivery on this song. The blues too, of notable influence on early Bad Seeds albums like The Firstborn Is Dead, are given their due here with the opening line of “Joy,” which rephrases the introduction of Son House’s “Death Letter”: “I woke up this morning with the blues all around my head.” Another of Cave’s holy trinity, Leonard Cohen, pops up through the nylon string guitar twirling in “Cinnamon Horses,” reminiscent of Cohen’s “Avalanche,” a cover of which appeared on the Bad Seeds’ debut album From Her to Eternity.

The most wrenchingly personal tribute, though, is the flowers bestowed to our lady of the Bad Seeds, Anita Lane, whose giggling cracked baby doll voice makes a surprise appearance in a recorded voicemail at the end of “O Wow O Wow (How Wonderful She Is).” While the voicemail is so personal it risks feeling exploitative, it’s meaningful to hear the late enigmatic singer, songwriter, and artist one last time—reminiscing about the fun they had, namely hinting at the collaborative writing of the continued Bad Seeds live staple, “From Her to Eternity” (“I don’t even know if we heard footsteps or imagined someone upstairs, then imagined the story…I didn’t even realize that everyone wasn’t like that”). These sonic references to others buried within Wild God strike me as a musical version of what I found so compelling about Stranger Than Kindness: The Nick Cave Exhibition, which traced Cave’s career through his collaborators and influences rather than celebrated him as a singular, solitary songwriting genius.

The latter view of Cave, however, is hard to avoid, which goes a long way to explain why his go-to observation about Wild God‘s joy seems to have been swallowed entirely and, ironically, uncritically by critics. Is Wild God joyful? Mmmm…not exactly. There is a foreboding quality to even the most exultant of songs: beds made of tears, vampires, ghosts, begging for mercy, horses kicking down stables. Even the song “Joy” isn’t what I’d call joyful, a melancholy depiction of the beginning crack in sorrow that might eventually lead toward joy. And the numerous boasts of nothing ever hurting again seem more like desperate pleas than statements of fact. Like this desperation, Wild God is a grasping reach—or maybe leap with so many critters and people jumping their way through the album—toward attaining joy. Like those gutter-hopping baptized amphibians in “Frogs” or the star-gazing in “Joy,” Wild God takes the position of one of my favorite Oscar Wilde quotes: “We are all in the gutter, but some of us are looking at the stars.”