Nick Cave's best albums: your essential, chronological guide

Features
By ( Louder ) published

Over the last 40 years, Nick Cave's albums have marked him out as a singular talent in alternative music – here, we go through his most significant musical moments

Nick Cave portrait
(Image credit: Mark Mainz/Getty Images)

With the best will in the world, few musicians would expect, at the age of 62, to be hitting the peak of their critical and commercial appeal. And yet, with the surprise release of the new Bad Seeds album, Ghosteen, this is exactly the position Nick Cave finds himself in today. 

Thanks in part to the exposure of his music on the likes of TV show Peaky Blinders, his presence in the mainstream consciousness is stronger than ever. But after four decades of delighting his unfailingly loyal fanbase with unique and vivid songs of violence, religion, madness, intense love and great beauty, it’s his ever-deepening relationship with his audience, triggered by personal tragedy, that has reignited the fire that’s burned throughout his finest moments. 

This stands in concert – intense congregations in which he takes the lead as shadowy preacher bordering cult leader; in his unflinchingly honest, emotionally open Q&A sessions; or in the Red Hand Files, a series of emails answering fans’ questions (“you can ask me anything”) and offering advice that veers from wryly hilarious for more flippant correspondents, to deeply moving (his thoughts on grief are, understandably given the death of his son Arthur in 2015, particularly beautiful), but always reveal a sense of kindness and empathy that has clearly come with age and experience. 

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It’s a vast change from the drug-fuelled, emaciated aggression and antagonism of his early days in The Birthday Party, a band dubbed the most violent in Britain at the time and one who openly despised their own audiences, or from the shamelessly salacious garage rock he produced with Bad Seeds offshoot Grinderman. But with each new chapter, Cave reveals a part of himself previously unseen, and his back catalogue becomes a little more complete.

Here, we look back at some of the significant musical moments in Cave’s history. 

The Birthday Party: where it all began (1976-1983)

Nick Cave And The Bad Seeds: the first wave (1983-1986)

Nick Cave And The Bad Seeds: a stylistic shift (1986-1990)

Nick Cave And The Bad Seeds: the darker side of love (1992-1994)

Nick Cave And The Bad Seeds: songs of depravity and death (1996)

Nick Cave And The Bad Seeds: heroin and heartbreak (1997)

Nick Cave And The Bad Seeds: a mended heart and a new millennium (2001-2004)

Grinderman: Cave cuts loose (2007-2010)

Nick Cave And The Bad Seeds: Growth and grief (2013-2016)

Nick Cave And The Bad Seeds: Ghosteen (2019)

Emma Johnston
Emma Johnston

Emma has been writing about music for 25 years, and is a regular contributor to Classic Rock, Metal Hammer, Prog and Louder. During that time her words have also appeared in publications including Kerrang!, Melody Maker, Select, The Blues Magazine and many more. She is also a professional pedant and grammar nerd and has worked as a copy editor on everything from film titles through to high-end property magazines. In her spare time, when not at gigs, you’ll find her at her local stables hanging out with a bunch of extremely characterful horses.