A rumbling synth bass and an ethereal theremin-like line followed by the lyrics: “You fell from the sky, Crash landed in a field, Near the river Adur”. So begins ‘Jesus Alone’, the first track on Nick Cave and The Bad Seeds’ new album, Skeleton Tree. In this song, the band immediately addresses the frontman’s son’s death last year. The band’s discography is full of songs with themes concerning death, murder and religion (I first heard the band when my brother put the CD of ‘Murder Ballads’ on in the car during a family road trip and refused to change it). While most of the songs were written and recorded before the death took place, the band returned to the recording studio some time afterwards, amended lyrics and added new music. The usual angry, violent songs are replaced in this album with an unsurprising mournful tone, with the theme of death and loss ever-present.

The album is unlike much of the band’s work, with its large amount of electronic music, but has the feel of Nick Cave nevertheless. The second track, ‘Rings of Saturn’, has a contemporary feel and is a departure from the band’s usual style, involving pseudo-rap over a drum machine and backing vocals. Cave himself joked about this in the film One More Time with Feeling, which accompanied the release of the album.

The rest of the album is more of a return to the general Nick Cave vibe, with ‘Girl in Amber’ again dealing with themes of loss and love after a tragedy. ‘Magneto’ is very much a classic Bad Seeds song giving violent images of death and sickness, and lyrics that could almost be taken from a song by The Mars Volta. ‘Anthrocene’, a play on the term denoting the modern geological period in which humanity has a noticeable effect on the planet, and which can be perceived in the lyrics, sounds a bit like the soundtrack to an art-house movie with a very minimalistic drum and bass line.

I first listened to this album when I was at work and not really paying attention, but the next song, ‘I Need You’, made me stop and listen. Synth organ starts out the track, giving it a religious mood, and the lyrics deal with the loss of a loved one. With the repeated lyrics “falling, falling, falling… just breathe, just breathe” and allusions to funerals (“A long black car is waiting ‘round”), this song is overtly emotionally charged. Cave sounds almost on the edge of tears towards the end. It cannot help but be interpreted as the artist talking about his son’s death, especially given that this track was only included on the album retrospectively. This is the climax of the album, and the following tracks ‘Distant Sky’ and ‘Skeleton Tree’ complete the catharsis of the previous track. You can almost feel the tear stained cheeks in these tracks, which deal with both loss and moving on.

Throughout the album, there is constant synthetic organ giving the work an ecclesiastic feeling which is, once again, not surprising given the context. While this is not my favourite Nick Cave album (Push the Sky Away probably is), it is far more moving than much of the bands work. Even if you don’t generally like gloomy, emotional music, this album is worth a listen – although if you’ve just had a breakup make sure you see it through to the end.