When the familiarly spindly figure erupts onto the stage in summer 2026, with his tall dark suit and taller forehead enclosing his gelled dark hair, I’m not sure what year it is. It’s not just that Nick Cave would sooner die than part with his unhinged Methodist pastor aesthetic or that his band of deranged brothers tours ceaselessly. They’ve played Berlin twice since 2022, and the last time they took over Waldbühne, exactly four years (and one day) prior, they even had the same opener: the sassy, majestic, explosive “Get Ready for Love”.
It’s an evening entirely devoid of surprises, and there’s a strange comfort to be found in that. Cave has never been known as a calming presence, the aftereffects of the hottest weekend in the city’s history blending seamlessly with his half-demonic, half-penitent jackass aesthetic. Now, nearly half a century into his majestic oeuvre, familiarity perhaps provides the last missing piece in the emotionally complex and mentally demanding (occasionally draining) puzzle that is a Bad Seeds show.
That’s not to say things are entirely under control; they never are with the Australian (plus Radiohead’s Colin Greenwood on bass) cohort, and that’s the essence of Nick Cave and the Bad Seeds‘ lasting charm. You may know what’s coming, in this case almost exactly, but you have no idea how it will be delivered or how you will react to it. Do not mistake familiarity for predictability, though. The beauty of Bad Seeds’ music lies in its mercurial nature; as little as a slight grimace from Cave can bring about a wealth of change in the context in which their songs are presented.
The UK and Europe Summer Tour 2026 brings nothing new insofar as there is no new album to promote. The magnificent Wild God (2024), a meditative, internalized epic about the joy of overcoming adversity and subduing grief, still rides high as the most recent in their 18-release opus (that’s counting the Bad Seeds only, not Nick Cave and Warren Ellis’ numerous extramarital dalliances). The setlist, however, includes a mere two tracks from this expansive release: the spectacular, gospel-like eponymous single and the more restrained but emotionally rich “Joy”.
The rest of the tunes performed are largely the same as on the last tour and the one before. Of the 23 songs played, a staggering 15 were performed for the Wild God show two years prior, with 13 recycled from the 2022 show at the same venue. Nobody seems bothered by this in the slightest in the packed, sold-out, 22,000-capacity amphitheater, and neither am I.
The Bad Seeds’ output is universally recognized as one of the strongest in rock history: they are one of the exceedingly rare outfits to be putting out new work across decades, five of them, to be exact, without losing either the critical or the popular vote. Wild God made it to most Best Of lists of 2024; before that, the transcendental, unfathomably poignant Ghosteen was Metacritic’s best-reviewed album of 2019.
All things considered, Cave, his melodic genie Ellis, and the rest of the Bad Seeds seem to have dispensed with the chase after novelty, opting out instead for a collective communion in search of peace. The unyieldingly verbose Cave, who still routinely converses with his fans through an open blog, The Red Hand Files, knows better than to demand answers or even meaning.
A man who has known loss in all its most vicious manifestations also knows that life only endures by living on. Some existential states are so difficult to explain that the only way they can be shared is through a ritual of raw feeling. This is what one would usually call “atmosphere” at a rock concert, and over the past ten years, the Bad Seeds’ worship has been, at turns, solemn and rapturous, rather than carnally unhinged.
It’s a funny thing to say about Nick Cave’s shows, since he spent most of his career dishing out elaborate, extraordinarily detailed lyrics with intricate plotting and cinematic narration. One of his novels, the deranged, visceral The Death of Bunny Munro, was recently turned into a TV series with Matt Smith (and it’s good). Despite an everlasting obsession with religious imagery, Cave has always been the most materialist of wordsmiths, pulling the grotesque and the divine from aesthetic explorations (remember “The Curse of Millhaven”?)
On the current, untitled tour, however, all hands on deck pull toward the heart of the vortex of the unknowable. Catharsis, joy, whatever you or the Bad Seeds would call it, is achieved mostly by grappling with the mystical, save for a handful of timeless favorites which make it to every setlist.
If it sounds like I’m firing off tangents, that’s because, in 2026, little new can be said about the Bad Seeds and their 43 years in the music business. Dozens of books, hundreds of academic essays, and virtually thousands of articles and analyses have already parsed most of the band’s and Cave’s artistic grandeur, dissecting every fragment of his work.
What’s more, Nick Cave himself has been unusually open to entertaining documentaristic material, especially since the death of his youngest twin son, Arthur. We thus bore witness to 371 candid replies to fans in The Red Hand Files, the 2016 documentary, One More Time With Feeling, and even a book of conversations between Cave and journalist Sean O’Hagen, Faith, Hope and Carnage (2022). One could hardly be more committed to demystifying their own body of work.
The show, of course, is a fantastic rock gig and a majestic demonstration of music- making prowess; this goes part and parcel with the Bad Seeds’ work as much as anything. Oscillating between deafening noise and piano-laden whispers, old songs and new, it is your usual Nick Cave and the Bad Seeds spectacle, profane and pleading, and always more than the sum of its parts.
For details on the delivery and reactions, my prior two live reviews have covered most of the 2026 setlist. At any rate, it’s unlikely anyone reading this hasn’t already been to a Bad Seeds gig, likely many times. The majority of the audience, well into their 50s and 60s, seems to have a seasoned parasocial relationship with their beloved troubadour of agony. The women cry (out) and stretch their arms to the ever-kinetic Nick Cave, while the men seem to be immersed in some sort of transcendentally contemplative state, as if weighing the amount of masculinity they are allowed to forego by surrendering to such earth-shattering emotion.
Surely, this is something Cave approves of. He invites interaction and adulation and revels in each flower thrown at him, each sign held in the air featuring a heartfelt or smart-ass note, depending on how willing a middle-aged person is to embarrass themselves. “From Her to Eternity” is still propulsively dissonant, and Cave still convulses and hollers as if it were 1984. Time has not worn his stage presence one bit. “Tupelo” and “Papa Won’t Leave You, Henry” are still the men’s belligerent favorites, and Cave still jumps up and kicks around as if arthritis were a laughable empty threat.
“Henry Lee”, nowadays sung with the British soul singer Janet Ramus, is as tenderly ominous as ever, and “The Weeping Song” is still darkly hilarious. “The Mercy Seat” is undoubtedly still one of the finest tracks ever written, and “Jubilee Street” and “Wild God” hold up well as latter-day instant classics of catharsis.
What remains to be commented on, then, is a fine question, and the answer can be pried out from the songs that remain once the crowd-pleasers and whimsical oldies (“Train Long Suffering” was an unusual, entertaining addition) are taken out. This tour, perhaps more than in recent years, was replete with visions of destruction and of an end, not just of life but of belief and humanity itself.
Where Nick Cave’s and Warren Ellis’ rambunctious “White Elephant”, taken off their album Carnage, exploded as a politically charged closer of the main set since 2022, now the sweeping, 15-minute epic “Hollywood”, annihilates any emotional defense left in the audience. An earnestly courageous choice given its length and themes of personal unraveling within a cataclysm, it is one of the finest tunes the Bad Seeds have ever written. I have hoped for years they would have the guts to put its infinite sadness front and center, and the payoff is miraculous, as close as one will come to transcendence in this realm of existence.
Nonetheless, “Hollywood” isn’t a knockout simply because of the vastness of its melody, or its imagery of the world crumbling off the coast of California, or its narration of folktales and hallucinations in which children die over and over again. The decision to make this particular tune the closer, a good six years after its release, seems to be political (though Cave and Ellis did play it on their Carnage tour four years ago).
Private Rumination, Collective Agony and Joy
Death, in its many forms, has always featured prominently in Cave’s and the Bad Seeds’ opus, considerably more since his family tragedies. Even so, this time around, tales of suffering and demise engulf, knead, and transform the entire setlist, trumped only by tales of separation and emotional loss. Four songs explicitly evoke the death of children (five if you count “Tupelo”), including mass death, with several more referencing physical carnage and the departure of loved ones.
Curiously, most of these songs, be it “Joy” or “Wide Lovely Eyes”, are additions and not the typical hits you would get at every show (yes, “Red Right Hand” is still there, no worries). Wedged between each of the olden crowd-pleasers, they creep up on you like a fever dream, a constant, nagging reminder that something is seriously wrong. Not in Cave’s occasionally satirical or playful way (“Train Long Suffering”), but in the way that would necessitate “Hollywood”, a story of the end of the world through the death of the child, as a closer.
Heard this way, the newest setlist seems to move past private rumination and into the territory of collective agony of today’s world. It’s impossible to hear about raging wildfires or children dying in agony without thinking of the global climate change disaster or the genocides in Gaza, Sudan, and beyond. Things were certainly bleak during the 2024 tour—and every other tour—as well, but the past two years have proven especially vicious for faith in and the fate of humanity.
It is no longer possible to turn on the news without endless reports of horror worldwide, and Cave, ever the verbose cultural connoisseur, is surely aware of that, as are his bandmates. A sensible person cannot remain unmoved by continuing scenes of civilian suffering across Gaza or Lebanon, people losing their homes or lives to natural disasters throughout the world, or a general descent into insanity typical for this day and age of withering rule of law and repressive government rule. For better or worse, the Bad Seeds’ music is a perfect match for these profound feelings of pain, alienation, and fear, and nowadays their entire live setlist, including the most popular tracks, connects beyond the (partially) abstract and cinematic to reflect a terrifying lived reality.
That’s not to say all is lost. Cave and his musical brethren are experienced and optimistic enough not to let suffering have the final word. With the expectation of transcendence or even a morsel of exuberance, the concert is bookended by two diametrically opposed odes to love, the carnal “Get Ready for Love” and the soulful “Into My Arms”. Each speaks to the power of benevolent emotion in mystical, cheeky ways only Cave can deliver, and each helps us process terror with hope, just as Cave has been doing in his later years.
Of course, this is just one way to manage the hurricane of feeling that Nick Cave and the Bad Seeds still offer so generously. The method remains as impressive as ever, however you read it, and their message of salvation through love and the memory of love now shines all the more powerfully. I welcome the idea of a more political Cave, dragging himself down in the gutter with the rest of us from his confabulatory cloud, substituting the fates of real people for those of cowboys and petty criminals. Whatever your takeaway, the Bad Seeds, nearly half a century on, remain one of the best bands you will ever see live.