Top 10 Best Nick Cave and The Bad Seeds Songs

Listening to a Nick Cave and the Bad Seeds record is like voluntarily walking into a beautifully orchestrated thunderstorm without an umbrella. It will ruin your hair. You know you are going to get completely soaked in gothic blues and murder ballads, yet you just cannot bring yourself to look away.

Formed in 1983 from the smoking ruins of the Birthday Party, the group began when Cave and multi-instrumentalist Mick Harvey decided their particular brand of post-punk needed a bit more literary madness. Along with Einstürzende Neubauten guitarist Blixa Bargeld, they quickly cooked up an atmosphere that sounds like a romantic fever dream set inside a haunted saloon. More than four decades later, they are still proving that nobody else can make absolute despair sound quite so appealing.

Your favorite era of the band says a lot about your tolerance for auditory whiplash. Some fans crave the noise. Maybe you prefer the chaotic, feedback-drenched shrieks of their early years, when they were tearing up the underground scene in West Berlin. Others want the tears. Perhaps your tastes lean toward the heartbreaking piano melodies and soaring choral arrangements of their later records.

Nick Cave has essentially built a career on dragging his listeners by the collar through vivid narratives of love, tragedy, and the occasional biblical apocalypse. Every studio release is a completely new aesthetic beast. This stylistic shape-shifting makes picking a definitive favorite track a nearly impossible task.

The Top Ten

Red Right Hand

If you want to know why Nick Cave and the Bad Seeds are a once-in-a-lifetime band, this is your song.
Nick Cave surely improved as a lyricist in his later years, but musically some of those songs are rather simple. No issue with that, see Leonard Cohen. But the whole Let Love In album gives you the keys to a world so terrifying yet so hypnotic.

I'm sure Peaky Blinders brought more new ears to Nick Cave's art because of this song.

Goosebumps every time I hear this song.
The Weeping Song
The Mercy Seat

A masterpiece.
Into My Arms

The correct answer is probably Red Right Hand, but I'm so sad to see this beautiful song so low down in the list I had to give it a vote.

All the other songs are trash. This is fire.

Masterpiece.
From Her to Eternity
Distant Sky
Where the Wild Roses Grow

It would seem bizarre for this song to work, but honestly it does brilliantly. This is a contender for me not just for his best song, but even one of my favorite songs ever.
The Ship Song

Together with "Lament," my favorite. It's so melancholic, sad, and hopeful, larger than life.

Best Cave song for me.
Jesus Alone

Should be number 1.
Do You Love Me?