Continuing the creative roll of Tender Prey and The Good Son, Henry's Dream showed the band in fierce and fine fettle once more. The biggest change was with the choice of producer – David Briggs, famed for his work on some of Neil Young's strongest albums. While Cave later thought the experiment didn't work as well as he might have hoped, Briggs does a fine enough job, perhaps not letting the group's full intensity through but still capturing a live feel nonetheless. Cave himself offers up another series of striking, compelling lyrics again exploring love, lust and death. Here, though, some of his images are the strongest he's yet delivered, especially with the near apocalyptic "Papa Won't Leave You, Henry," which begins the album brilliantly as the narrator lurches through a landscape of storms, brothels and urban decay. Equally powerful, if slower and calmer, is Dream's lead single, "Straight to You," with Cave delivering a forceful declaration of love.

Besides being noteworthy as an astonishingly good all-covers album, Kicking Against the Pricks is notable for the arrival of a new key member for the Seeds, drummer Thomas Wydler. Besides being a fine percussionist, able to perform at both the explosive and restrained levels Cave requires, Wydler also allowed Harvey to concentrate on adding guitar and keyboards live as well as in the studio, a notable bonus. Race reappears briefly to add some guitar while former Birthday Party cohorts Rowland Howard and Tracy Pew guest as well, the latter on some of his last tracks before his untimely death. The selection of songs is quite impressive, ranging from old standards like "Long Black Veil" to everything from John Lee Hooker's "I'm Gonna Kill That Woman" and Gene Pitney's pop aria "Something's Gotten Hold of My Heart." Matching the range of material, the Seeds are well on their way to becoming the rock/cabaret/blues showband of Cave's dreams, able to conjure up haunting, winsome atmospheres ("Sleeping Annaleah") as much as higher-volume takes (Roy Orbison's "Running Scared," the Velvet Underground's "All Tomorrow's Parties").

Keeping the same line-up from Henry's Dream, Nick Cave and company turn in yet another winner with Let Love In. Compared to Henry's Dream, Let Love In is something of a more produced effort – longtime Cave boardsman Tony Cohen oversees things, and from the first track, one can hear the subtle arrangements and carefully constructed performances. Love, unsurprisingly, takes center stage of the album.

This music documentary weaves together performances from Nick Cave and the Bad Seeds' 2016 album Skeleton Tree with candid footage of Cave opening up about the death of his 15-year-old son. Directed by Andrew Dominik (Chopper, The Assassination of Jesse James by the Coward Robert Ford).

The blues had long been a potent undercurrent in the Birthday Party's music, so it wasn't all that surprising that Nick Cave embraced the sound and feeling of rural blues on his second album with the Bad Seeds, The Firstborn Is Dead. What was startling was how well Cave and his bandmates – Barry Adamson, Mick Harvey, and Blixa Bargeld – were able to absorb and honor the influences of artists like Skip James and Charley Patton while creating a sound that was unmistakably their own. The moody obsessions of rural blues – trains, floods, imprisonment, sin, fear, and death – seemed made to order for Cave, and he was able to tap into the doomy iconography of this music with potent emotional force; on "Tupelo," he makes a sweeping and disturbing epic of the rain-swept night when Elvis Presley was born, and "Knocking on Joe" is a tale of life on the work gang that communicates the pain of the spirit as clearly as the ache of the body.

In 2022, Nick Cave and Warren Ellis returned to their native Australia for 16 shows, taking their acclaimed 2021 album Carnage on the road, along with songs from the Nick Cave and The Bad Seeds catalogue. Three performances at the Sydney Opera House on December 16th, 17th and 18th were the climactic shows of an emotional trip, captured for a luminous new live album, Australian Carnage - Live At The Sydney Opera House.

In April 2013, Nick Cave & the Bad Seeds were booked to play the Coachella Valley Music and Arts Festival, and with the same lineup of acts appearing two consecutive weekends, Cave and his bandmates had a few days to kill in California. During their downtime in the Golden State, Cave and the Bad Seeds cut a live-in-the-studio session for Santa Monica's public radio station KCRW-FM, and the recordings have been released under the straightforward (if less than imaginative) title Live from KCRW. Given that Cave's Push the Sky Away had been released just two months earlier, it should come as no surprise that the KCRW set followed the soulful but understated tone of that album, and the two releases share four songs, but in many respects, this is a richer and more emotionally engaging experience, and nearly as precise…

Over the course of a dozen solo albums and two decades, the former Birthday Party frontman and his trusty Bad Seeds have been on an endless death march through a landscape of brooding depression, tragic obsession and black-hearted murder balladry. Nocturama, as you might expect, finds them no closer to the light. Minimally decorated, languidly paced and darkly textured, most of these 10 cuts once again combine Cave’s literary narratives and croaking baritone to maximum effect, weaving mesmerizing tales of death, sin and salvation, whose bleak messages are leavened only by the sheer beauty of their performance and artistry. Every once in a while, just to startle us, Cave breaks the spell by rocking out - the hard-hitting Dead Man In My Bed lurches to a stumbling 15/8 beat, and Babe, I’m On Fire is an angular, 15-minute epic of fixation…

Murder Ballads brought Nick Cave's morbidity to near-parodic levels, which makes the disarmingly frank and introspective songs of The Boatman's Call all the more startling. A song cycle equally inspired by Cave's failed romantic affairs and religious doubts, The Boatman's Call captures him at his most honest and despairing - while he retains a fascination for gothic, Biblical imagery, it has little of the grand theatricality and self-conscious poetics that made his albums emotionally distant in the past. This time, there's no posturing, either from Cave or the Bad Seeds. The music is direct, yet it has many textures, from blues to jazz, which offer a revealing and sympathetic bed for Cave's best, most affecting songs. The Boatman's Call is one of his finest albums and arguably the masterpiece he has been promising throughout his career.