Some music sets out to conjure eternities. Extended drones, chantlike repeating phrases, tolling chords, spacious reverberation: Those are meditative sounds, defying fracture or interruption, tuning out the momentary and the trivial, invoking concentration, absorption, ritual and rapture. It’s the kind of music Nick Cave has chosen for “Ghosteen,” his 17th studio album leading the Bad Seeds.

Cave has been prolific and chameleonic since the early 1980s, when he emerged with the Birthday Party, the Australian post-punk band whose jagged songs introduced Cave’s lifelong fascination with humanity’s extremes: evil and transcendence, desire and violence, perdition and redemption, creation and annihilation. He started the Bad Seeds after the Birthday Party disbanded in 1983; since then he has written books, acted in and scored films (with the Bad Seeds’ longtime musical director, Warren Ellis) and also led a raucously collaborative band, Grinderman. His music never settled into any idiom for long.

“Ghosteen” is an eerie, somber monolith, a set of 11 songs that stretches over an hour and is grouped on two CDs. “The songs on the first album are the children. The songs on the second album are their parents. Ghosteen is a migrating spirit,” Cave wrote.

Throughout “Ghosteen,” the tempos are slow and slower, as songs circle through a handful of chords or hover in place while tension builds. Although the Bad Seeds still have the lineup of a rock band, on “Ghosteen” drums and guitars are almost entirely absent, replaced by the disembodied, sustained tones of synthesizers and string sections — built from Ellis’s violin — behind Cave’s brooding baritone, singing or speaking. Cave foreshadowed the approach with songs on “The Skeleton Tree” in 2016 — “Girl in Amber,” “Magneto” and “Distant Sky” — but those were interludes. This is a whole.