Nick Cave and The Bad Seeds share life-affirming epic, ‘Frogs’
With their upcoming 18th studio album on the horizon, Nick Cave and The Bad Seeds have shared ‘Frogs’, the second single from Wild God. However, the track was actually the first penned for the album, serving as a world-opening, life-affirming outing with all of Cave’s signature lyrical stylings.
But by now, attempting to define Cave’s ‘signatures’ is a tricky task. The Bad Seeds, as a collective unit, including their fearsome leader, are utterly unrecognisable from their earliest shape. The wild punks are long since retired. Gone is the violence and blasphemy of albums like Murder Ballads, or spiralling, high-octane tracks like ‘The Mercy Seat’.
Instead, the band are now underpinned by very different specialities. Cave’s storytelling is there but is far sparser, told by simply a series of metaphors and images rather than any narrative. Instrumentally, the band are parred back as their rock sound is replaced by something all together vaster and more cinematic, influenced by Cave and Ellis’ score work and duo outings like Carnage.
On ‘Frogs’, all the things that now define who Nick Cave and The Bad Seeds are come out in full force and receive their strongest display in a while. Lyrically, the track exists in the spiritual space they’ve played in for a while now and that Cave seems especially interested in. “It’s Sunday morning, and I’m holding your hand / Amazed of love and amazed of pain,” he croons, balancing big feelings of awe with simple images, summarising the sense of gratitude for life that has coloured a lot of his later works since grappling with grief and God on Skeleton Tree and Ghosteen. It also feels reminiscent of ‘Balcony Man’, harking back to the line, “This morning is amazing, and so are you”.
Though this time round, ‘Frogs’ also gets glimmers of the destruction that used to rule over the band’s work. “Take that gun out of your hand,” he keeps repeating. But where Cave’s old characters, like the infamous ‘Stagger Lee’, would have shot someone dead, the voice of ‘Frogs’ is nonviolent, declaring, “all will be well”.
From start to finish, the track feels life-affirming and glorious. Nestling Cave’s vocals is one of the band’s incredibly vast, almost heavenly soundscapes that seem to swell and swell formlessly like clouds. The band somehow sound more like a choir than any classic rock band, so when a chorus of voices does eventually burst to life, it feels euphoric as a perfect climax to the track.
In Cave’s own words, the song is coloured by “sheer exuberance”. It seems to capture a sense of divine awe, a desire to live, or an overwhelming love for small joys, like Sunday rain or walking someone home. From the huge, epic scale of the subject and instrumentation to the tiny image of a frog, Nick Cave and The Bad Seeds seem to have written a spiritual soundtrack for all creatures, great and small.
Never Miss A Beat
The Far Out New Music Newsletter
All the latest New Music from the independent voice of culture.
Straight to your inbox.