★★★★★

For the past few years Nick Cave has been speaking to his fans directly, on his website or in shows that fall somewhere between concert and confessional. Revelations have ranged from the comic — “I was so surprised I almost dropped my syringe,” he admitted, about being chucked by his girlfriend PJ Harvey in the mid-1990s — to the tragic, as he tried to make sense of his 15-year-old son Arthur dying in 2015. Before Arthur’s death Cave was an alpha-male artist: sensitive but domineering. Now you listen to this strange fever dream of an album and wonder how much he has been transformed by grief.

According to a statement by Cave, the songs on the first disc are the children, the songs on