What Makes Nick Cave Nick Cave
Nick Cave is not difficult to categorise — he's just difficult to equal. His territory is fixed and deep: death, desire, God, violence, grief, the blues as a theological proposition. He writes narrative songs that contain entire novels' worth of moral complexity. He performs them with the physical conviction of a preacher who has lost his faith but not his need to preach. And across forty years and a dozen radically different backing bands, he has never compromised or diluted toward the mainstream.
The Bad Seeds era from From Her to Eternity (1984) through to Ghosteen (2019) is one of the most remarkable sustained bodies of work in popular music. The Birthday Party before it is among the most confrontational and viscerally alive post-punk on record. The more recent material — Carnage, Wild God — shows an artist still evolving, still capable of surprising himself.
If you've followed him to the end of his available discography and want to know what else operates at this level of ambition and darkness, here are eight records.
All eight of these records reward vinyl playback specifically. Cave's production aesthetic — analogue warmth, physical drum sounds, the space around instruments — translates better to the format than to lossy streaming. Where pressing notes are relevant, they're included below.
The Eight Records
1. Leonard Cohen — Songs of Love and Hate (1971)
The most direct ancestor. Leonard Cohen is the only songwriter who works in the same territory as Cave with comparable literary weight, and Songs of Love and Hate is his most extreme album — harder, darker, and more unforgiving than the better-known Songs of Leonard Cohen (1967). "Avalanche" opens the record with an almost unbearable directness; "Famous Blue Raincoat" is among the most emotionally precise songs in the language.
Cave has spoken about Cohen repeatedly in interviews. You can hear the influence everywhere, particularly in the later Bad Seeds ballads: the slow harmonic motion, the voice as an instrument of narrative authority, the refusal to resolve suffering into comfort.
On vinyl: The original CBS pressings from the early 1970s are excellent and affordable (£20–£50 in good condition). The 2016 Sony Legacy reissue is a reliable new buy.
2. Tom Waits — Rain Dogs (1985)
Rain Dogs was released the same year as the Bad Seeds' The Firstborn Is Dead, and the two albums occupy overlapping territory: the American south as mythological landscape, junkyard instrumentation, characters from the margins of the world. Waits's arrangements on Rain Dogs — guitars, accordion, percussion made from found objects, Keith Richards — are as visually specific as Cave's most cinematic writing.
What separates Waits from Cave is the element of black comedy. Where Cave tends toward the tragic-sacred, Waits finds the absurd in the same darkness. Rain Dogs is a funnier record than anything in the Bad Seeds catalogue, which makes it no less devastating in its best moments.
On vinyl: The original Island Records pressing (ILPS 9803) is the one to have. More accessible than original CBS Cohen pressings, typically £25–£60 in good condition. The current reissue is competent.
3. Mark Lanegan — I'll Take Care of You (1999)
Mark Lanegan had a voice — dark, sand-and-gravel baritone, blues-soaked — that existed in the same universe as Cave's. I'll Take Care of You is a covers album: blues standards and obscure country songs, mostly slow, mostly devastating. The arrangements are minimal and precise, and Lanegan's vocal performances have the kind of weight that cannot be faked.
His entire solo catalogue from The Winding Sheet (1990) onward rewards attention, but I'll Take Care of You is the single most direct comparison point: literary darkness, the voice as the dominant instrument, the blues as a moral and emotional framework rather than a musical genre.
On vinyl: Original Sub Pop pressing; the 2019 reissue is excellent and widely available.
4. Scott Walker — Tilt (1995)
Tilt is where Scott Walker stopped making pop records and started making something else entirely: orchestral compositions of extreme, almost violent abstraction, with Walker's voice as the only point of human reference. It is deeply strange, often unlistenable on first encounter, and — once it opens up — one of the most intensely affecting records of the 1990s.
Cave and Walker were mutual admirers. The connection is most audible in the Bad Seeds' more orchestral moments — The Boatman's Call, sections of Nocturama — but Tilt goes further than Cave has, into territory where conventional musical pleasure is largely abandoned. "The Cockfighter" and "Bouncer See Bouncer" are as close to pure dread as any recorded music.
On vinyl: Original Fontana pressing (£20–£50) or the 2006 reissue. Not a record you play for hi-fi demonstration; play it in the dark.
5. Will Oldham (Palace Music / Bonnie 'Prince' Billy) — Viva Last Blues (1995)
The country-folk end of the Cave spectrum. Will Oldham shares Cave's literary obsessions — death, religion, the body, desire — but comes at them from an Appalachian folk tradition rather than a post-punk one. Viva Last Blues (released as Palace Music) is the most direct access point: electric guitars, rough recording, songs about American mortality that feel genuinely old.
Oldham's voice is strikingly unlike Cave's in timbre but operates with the same principle: the voice as an instrument of moral statement rather than entertainment. His catalogue under the Bonnie 'Prince' Billy name (particularly I See a Darkness, 1999) is essential listening for anyone following this thread.
On vinyl: The original Drag City pressing is the one to find. Reissues are available and sound fine. I See a Darkness is perhaps more widely available and is the natural follow-up.
6. Swans — The Seer (2012)
If Cave represents the literary-gothic end of this world, Swans are the physical end. Michael Gira's compositions are not narrative songs — they are sustained sonic events, built from repetition and volume and a particular kind of ritual intensity that shares Cave's post-punk roots but heads somewhere quite different. The Seer is a double album, two hours long, and it is not approachable on first listen.
The connection to Cave is historical as well as sonic: Gira and Cave emerged from the same post-punk world of the early 1980s, when extreme music could still be made within the orbit of the mainstream record industry. What Swans did at maximum volume and minimum narrative, Cave did at medium volume and maximum narrative. The two approaches illuminate each other.
On vinyl: The original Young God Records pressing is the one; the current reissue from Mute is excellent. A double album that rewards the vinyl format's side-by-side structure.
7. PJ Harvey — To Bring You My Love (1995)
The 1990s were a significant decade for dark, literary songwriting, and To Bring You My Love is one of its defining statements. Harvey's arrangements here — heavy, swampy, built around blues structures gone wrong — share a sonic DNA with the Bad Seeds' more electric moments. Her lyrical territory (possession, desire, death, revenge) overlaps directly with Cave's, and she manages to be simultaneously more physically direct and more mythologically strange.
The professional relationship between Cave and Harvey deepened into a personal one (their duet "Henry Lee" on Murder Ballads is one of the great moments on either artist's catalogue), and it shows in the music. To Bring You My Love is the record that most clearly demonstrates they were drawing from the same well.
On vinyl: The Island Records original pressing is the target. Competent reissues are available. The recently released deluxe edition includes a bonus disc and has been well reviewed for sound quality.
8. Current 93 — Thunder Perfect Mind (1992)
The most esoteric of these eight recommendations, and the one that requires the most patience. David Tibet's Current 93 operates in a space between English folk music, apocalyptic religious imagery, and something that defies genre entirely. Thunder Perfect Mind is their most accessible record: it has songs, melodies, recognisable structures. Tibet's lyrics are dense with Gnostic imagery, violence, and a kind of grief that feels pre-human in its scale.
Cave and Tibet were contemporaries and friends in the early 1980s London underground scene. The connections run deep: the same literary ambition, the same use of religious imagery without orthodox belief, the same willingness to pursue darkness past the point where audience comfort is a concern.
On vinyl: Original Durtro pressing is the collector's choice. The Durtro/Jnana back catalogue is available via the label direct.
"Cave finds the sacred in the gutter. These eight records are doing the same work from different positions — same darkness, different entry points."
— Listen VinylPressing Notes
One consistent observation: all eight of these artists and albums tend to be pressed with less commercial pressure than mainstream chart releases. That has two implications.
The first is that many of them are available in high-quality pressings from the original labels at reasonable prices — none of the inflated prices you see for Pink Floyd or Beatles reissues. The Cave discography itself, particularly the Bad Seeds albums on Mute Records, has been consistently well-pressed, and the current Mute reissue programme (most albums available as 180g reissues) is genuinely good.
The second is that some of the more niche records (Current 93, Will Oldham, early Swans) were originally pressed in small quantities on independent labels, which means clean originals are worth searching for and can still be found at reasonable prices because the collector market is less frenzied than the classic rock equivalent.
For all of these records: a wet clean before first play, even for new purchases. Indie-label pressing quality can vary.
Further Into the Dark
The eight records above are access points. Each of them leads further in.
From Leonard Cohen: the entire late-career revival album sequence (The Future, You Want It Darker) and the underrated New Skin for the Old Ceremony (1974).
From Tom Waits: Swordfishtrombones (1983) came before Rain Dogs and is where his experimental turn began; Bone Machine (1992) is darker and more extreme than both.
From Bonnie 'Prince' Billy: the collaboration albums with Matt Sweeney (Superwolf, 2005) and the Callahan comparison is worth making — Bill Callahan (as Smog) operates in adjacent territory and his album A River Ain't Too Much to Love (2005) is as good as anything in this list.
From PJ Harvey: Rid of Me (1993) is rawer and more confrontational than To Bring You My Love, produced by Steve Albini, a record of almost uncomfortable intensity. White Chalk (2007) is the quiet, gothic counterpart.
From Swans: backwards into the catalogue — Filth (1983), Cop (1984), Children of God (1988) — is to watch Gira develop the same obsessions from scratch, in conditions of genuine underground obscurity.
And Nick Cave himself: if you've only heard the mid-period Bad Seeds (roughly Henry's Dream through The Boatman's Call), go back to the Birthday Party — Prayers on Fire (1981) and Junkyard (1982) — and then forward to Skeleton Tree (2016) and Ghosteen (2019), the albums made in the aftermath of his son Arthur's death. They are among the most devastating records made in the 21st century and they show an artist for whom darkness is not a pose but a condition of existence.
That is the quality that separates Cave from almost everyone else, and that makes this corner of music worth following: the darkness is real. The best records in this company feel that way.