Out of a broken band came forty years of the Bad Seeds

The Bad Seeds exist because another band collapsed. In 1983 the Birthday Party, whose members had met at a boarding school in Melbourne, broke up after tension over the sessions for a pair of EPs. Nick Cave and guitarist Rowland S. Howard wanted different things from songwriting, and Cave later said the songs they were writing were simply at odds with each other.

By September of that year, a new group was taking shape in London around Cave and Mick Harvey, who now played mostly drums. Blixa Bargeld of Einstürzende Neubauten joined them, along with Barry Adamson from Magazine and JG Thirlwell, who made music as Foetus. It started as a backing band for a solo project called Man or Myth?, approved by Mute Records. For its first six months it was known as Nick Cave and the Cavemen.

The first live show took place at the Crystal Ballroom in St Kilda on 31 December 1983. Their debut album, From Her to Eternity, came in 1984, with a title track credited to lyricist Anita Lane, Cave's longtime girlfriend. Through the 1980s the sound drew on post-punk, blues and gothic rock, and the lineup kept changing as musicians from several countries came and went.

Then the band softened. Albums such as The Good Son in 1990 and The Boatman's Call in 1997 let in other influences, and “Into My Arms” sits in that gentler territory. After Harvey left in 2009 the music moved toward electronic and ambient textures, most clearly on the trilogy of Push the Sky Away, Skeleton Tree and Ghosteen.

Today the group counts eighteen studio albums, the latest being Wild God from 2024, and a lineup that includes Warren Ellis, Martyn P. Casey, George Vjestica, Jim Sclavunos and Thomas Wydler, among others. Few bands start from a rupture and keep re-inventing themselves for so long, and the Bad Seeds have turned that restlessness into their method.