The Bad Seeds’ 15th studio album represents a changing of the guard on several fronts. It’s the ensemble’s first album without co-founding member Mick Harvey, and the last to feature longtime contributor Conway Savage. Push the Sky Away also follows the official demise of Grinderman, Nick Cave’s unleashed offshoot. Many of these songs are set to sleepy, elliptical loops devised by Dirty Three violinist and frequent Bad Seeds collaborator Warren Ellis. He takes on Harvey’s role as multi-instrumentalist, giving the album an eerie lullaby quality overall. Reuniting with repeat producer Nick Launay in a mansion in the south of France—a process captured in the 2014 documentary 20,000 Days on Earth—the band also re-enlist early member Barry Adamson to play bass on two tracks. But despite those comfortably familiar touches, this record still carves out plenty of new space. That’s partly down to Cave’s lyrics, which draw on modern phenomena alongside more timeless imagery. “We Real Cool” references Wikipedia, Cave having found its often unreliable information fascinating during the writing of the album. The nearly eight-minute “Higgs Boson Blues” recounts Robert Johnson meeting the Devil per the infamous blues fable, but then goes on to mention both Miley Cyrus and her alter ego Hannah Montana. Despite the music remaining at a simmer, Cave still chews much scenery with his lyrics. Other themes are more classically Cave; “Jubilee Street” could have easily fit into 1996’s Murder Ballads. Cave delivers the dark material with aching aplomb, commanding an easy gravity alongside the band’s soft, tidal arrangements. “Wide Lovely Eyes” reminds us that The Bad Seeds are now both antecedent and peer to The National’s bruised romantic brooding, while “Water’s Edge” stokes a restless rumble of bass and drums to evoke a reeling spaghetti western score. The self-referential “Finishing Jubilee Street” unfolds like slow, skeletal blues. Announced by ghostly synth notes, the closing title track savours as much open space as possible before gently fading out while Cave is still singing. Between the quiet, trance-like minimalism and the key sounds of Ellis’s many different instruments at play, Push the Sky Away strongly foreshadows 2021’s CARNAGE, an elegiac and often beguiling album credited to Cave and Ellis alone.