Ghosteen is overwhelming by design. After two studio albums that were sprawling in scope but concise in form, Nick Cave & the Bad Seeds’ new double album serves as the heavenly epilogue, with the 62-year-old songwriter’s writing at its most hallucinogenic and emotionally piercing. It’s music that demands attention, space, time. The 12-minute title track—one of two lengthy concluding songs that Cave describes as “parents” to the preceding eight songs’ “children”—is its most stunning composition.

Fitting for a pair who have found a prolific part-time job scoring films, Cave and longtime collaborator Warren Ellis tell an entire story with the arrangement: part ambient, part piano ballad, part psychedelic prog showstopper. Accompanied by strings and bells and sci-fi synths, its sweeping rise and fall is structured to take your breath away. Cave’s narrative is just as transportive. His voice is weary—as old as he has ever sounded—and his visions come in disorienting bursts. At one point, he diverts to an Inland Empire-style fairytale-turned-nightmare, where a family of bears “age a lifetime” as they watch TV together. Elsewhere, he sings about hope and hopelessness, about dancing in joy and washing the clothes of people we’ve lost. “Love’s like that, you know,” he observes.

Compared to Cave’s other recent epics, like 2013’s “Higgs Boson Blues” and “Jubilee Street,” this song doesn’t find catharsis in the Bad Seeds’ ragged, dramatic crescendos. Instead, its climax arrives with a surreal chorus, where Cave’s voice gets coated in effects that feel jarringly inorganic—a dash of CGI from an artist more interested in stark documentary as of late. It’s the loudest the album really gets, though the fanfare doesn’t last long. The music slows down, the key changes back to a minor one, and the dream—a glowing figure dancing in his palm—fades away, leaving a deep void at the song’s core. “There’s nothing wrong with loving something you can’t hold in your hand,” Cave sings later, as he gestures toward a world filled with both love and pain. In his recent work, he’s come startlingly close to summoning both with each breath.