By Matt Hanson

With the release of Wild God, his stirring 18th studio album, it seems as if the charismatic poète maudit has achieved, and more impressively maintained, his own version of peace.

Nick Cave is one of the few living singers I can think of who knows his way around both the sacred and the profane. According to Mutiny in Heaven, a documentary about his early years with The Birthday Party, Cave’s raucous band was fueled by an obsession with the wrathful God of the Old Testament. “God spoke not only to me but through me. And his breath stank.” Several decades later, with the release of Wild God, his stirring 18th studio album, it seems as if the charismatic poète maudit has achieved, and more impressively maintained, his own version of peace.

These days Cave has become a venerable elder statesman, dispensing hard-won sapience from his own website and in interviews, notably in an extensive talk with Steven Colbert. He’s done an enormous amount of living: years of drugs and raucous live shows, settling in different continents, writing novels and movies, and suffering two terrible family tragedies. He should have wisdom to bestow. And he does. The profundity of Cave’s work has deepened over time. He’s unquestionably a writer rather than an intensely wordy front man. The ultimate test; his lyrics don’t go flat stranding in print on a page, as some gifted songwriters’ do.

Bracingly, the songs on Wild God don’t proselytize or offer pious pablum about conversion to some ideology or another. The record gives off a redemptive glow, but it’s very much in keeping with Cave’s style. Blues references jostle with murmurs about ghosts, vampires, and mysterious horses. Angelic-sounding choirs hang like elegant curtains above somber piano-based melodies. “Touched by the spirit/ touched by the flame” goes the chorus of “Conversion” which might sound almost cloyingly earnest were it not delivered with such genuine conviction and anguish.

The title track and “Frogs” are the standouts. It really has to be a wild god to capture the imagination of a guy like Cave, who has explained eloquently that “when I hear a song of praise sung to a God that on any empirical level probably doesn’t exist, I am somehow moved more, and filled with a deep respect for that human need for meaning that is so powerful, so desperate and so beautifully absurd.” The title track’s almost spoken word narration spins a tale of a wandering wraith with tasteful touches of both desperation and absurdity.

That stentorian baritone doesn’t snarl like it used to, which is only to be expected after all these years. It’s probably a good thing. For the past few years, Cave’s been working through the accidental death of his son in exactly the way born artists should — by creating art. For example, the uplifting touch in “Frogs.” The song’s delight in looking at small creatures, vibrant with life, is palpable, a bliss that is amusing, given how often the apocalyptic used to be on his mind. The sinister aggression of his early work has gradually evolved into a wizened acceptance, a religious reverence for life. When he sings “I told my friends that life was good/ That love would endure if it could” there’s no hint of naiveté, which makes it that much more uplifting.

When a ghostly apparition of a boy with “a flaming head” visits him at night, the kind of thing we’ve come to expect from his morbid imagination, the specter doesn’t come with fire and brimstone. He has a very different message: “we’ve had too much of sorrow, now’s the time for joy.” The fact that Cave has managed to survive his torrid past is something for which he’s clearly grateful, and to be making vital music at his age (66) is a blessing both for him and for us. Not compromising an inch of artistic vision, he’s still playing as intensely as he ever did, but now a grand equanimity is infused into every note. If that’s not a wild god’s idea of rapture, then I don’t know what is.

Matt Hanson is a contributing editor at the Arts Fuse whose work has also appeared in the American Interest, the Baffler, the Guardian, the Millions, the New Yorker, the Smart Set, and elsewhere. A longtime resident of Boston, he now lives in New Orleans.