Ghosteen

Ghosteen is a double album containing 11 tracks, one of which is a spoken-word piece. The first part of the album features eight songs, which Nick Cave describes as "the children"; the second part of the album contains two longer songs and a spoken-word track, which he describes as "their parents". In summarising Ghosteen, Cave referred to the album both as "a migrating spirit" and the final part of a trilogy of albums he and the Bad Seeds began with Push the Sky Away (2013). Ghosteen has been described as an ambient album and Nick Cave and the Bad Seeds' "most minimalist … work to date", with the album's instrumentation featuring "little more than synths and piano" alongside Cave's vocals. Cave began writing lyrics for the songs on Ghosteen in February 2017. Cave, who had "very deliberately" not written lyrics since the end of 2015, attributed a "new sort of lyrical confidence" to a process of "enforced shutdown", where he would "confine self to barracks for a while". The lyrics were written at Cave's home in Brighton, a change from his usual "disciplined" routine of writing lyrics in a private office. The album's lyrics have been described as "fantasy stories" that contain themes of "love, loss and letting go". Release Ghosteen was released on 4 October 2019 on streaming services and as a digital download on Ghosteen Ltd. Double CD and LP editions are due to be released a month later on 8 November on Bad Seed Ltd, the band's own imprint. Several album-listening events were held in 33 cities in Australia, Europe and the US on 3 October, alongside a worldwide YouTube stream featuring an animated lyric film directed by Tom Hingston. The album was announced by Nick Cave in response to a fan question on his blog, The Red Hand Files, on 23 September. The title, track listing and brief descriptions of the album's songs were revealed; a second follow-up post the same day included the album's cover art. The lyrics to "Fireflies", Ghosteen's penultimate track, had previously been published in the first-ever issue of The Red Hand Files a year prior. Writing for The Guardian, Alexis Petridis summarised that Ghosteen featured "the most beautiful songs has ever recorded" and awarded it a full five-out-of-five-star rating. Petridis considered the album to be "an infinitely warmer, sweeter sibling" to Skeleton Tree, noting that "it continues and extends the weightless, drifting style of its two predecessors." In another five-star review for NME, Elizabeth Aubrey said "if Skeleton Tree gave a glimpse into grief in its immediate aftermath, Ghosteen is a grief considered", drawing comparisons between Cave's lyrics and CS Lewis' A Grief Observed (1960), in that the album "feels like the trying-to-make-sense stage of grief, even when there's often no sense to be found." Aubrey praised Ghosteen as "a work of extraordinary, unsettling scope", calling it the Bad Seeds' most beautiful album "and also one of the most singularly devastating." The Independent reviewer Helen Brown called Ghosteen "astonishing" in a five-out-of-five-star review, praising in particular Cave's vocals and lyrics and Warren Ellis' use of analogue synthesisers, which she described as "a warm cloud of ambient solace".