Ghosteen

A piece of work that’s difficult but hopeful, full of darkness but supplier of enough light to illuminate its every square inch. One that’s gentle yet staggering, beautiful yet devastating.

Ghosteen sounds like the musings of a handful of lost souls, each trapped in their own barren prairie with memories that soothe and ache at once, and its power is overwhelming while the volume is low-key.

The anguish a parent feels for losing their child is harrowing and Ghosteen masterfully captures Nick Cave's grief and spiraling rumination on mortality.

Everything might be as distant as the stars. But Nick Cave, on Ghosteen, makes empathy and elegy seem so near and touchable.

Ghosteen takes years of hurt, sorrow and reflection and releases them in an astonishing double-album, one of the most challenging and most beautiful of Cave’s career.

On Ghosteen Cave seems more vital than ever, a master of his craft who has taken the immense nature of grief and channelled it into an album that burns with beauty.

Ghosteen is an almost supernaturally wonderful record. It is, perhaps, the ultimate Nick Cave album—yet somehow unlike anything he has done before.

The beauty of Ghosteen is the way it inhabits the darkness and still manages to harvest optimism. It is extreme stuff, singular in its design, ruthless in its execution.

Another open letter straight from artist to audience that cuts right to the core of what means to have loved, lost and loved again.

There’s an embarrassment of riches here, and emotional gut punches land hard and fast from the outset.

On Ghosteen, Cave doesn’t offer any answers, but there’s comfort to be found in keeping the questions open-ended.

His latest ... seems like a broader, and altogether more stunning reaction to losing his son.

Forty years into his career, Nick Cave emerges with one of his most powerful albums yet, an endlessly giving and complex meditation on mortality and our collective grief.

Often, listening to Ghosteen feels like attending a surreal, freewheeling wake.

Gorgeous, grief-stricken LP.

All in all, it’s a lot to process — not lighter but endlessly absorbing.

It’s an intriguing, somewhat beguiling listen and, surprise or not, an infinitely beautiful, heartbreaking album that only a master can create.

The chiselled lyrics of latter-day Cave, the sober working writer, feel illuminated.

Despite a few questionable experimental moments (that simply make the albums more Bad Seeds-eque) the highlights soar to towering heights, making the piece a triumph.

It's a monolithic record: immense, imposing and impossible to fully comprehend with a single listen.

By virtue of its moving vocal performances and lyricism, Ghosteen is among Nick Cave's finest statements—even if its sound design often leaves something to be desired.

It’s a strange, beautifully bewildering record that I’m finding equally bewildering and enchanting.