Nick Cave & The Bad Seeds: Ghosteen 2LP Vinyl

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Why you'll love it

This 2LP set comes in a gatefold jacket with lyric-printed inner sleeves and a download code. It scored 96 on Metacritic, the highest of 2019, and topped the year-end lists of Mojo, The Observer and The Times.

This edition

2LP set
Gatefold jacket
Printed lyric inner sleeves
Download card included

About the album

Ghosteen comes in two parts, The Children and The Parents, and the shape tells you a lot. The band's 17th studio album and their first double since Abattoir Blues / The Lyre of Orpheus, it arrived in the years after Cave's son Arthur died in 2015, and it treats grief with a tenderness that has moved a great many listeners. It's a quiet, luminous record, closer to a hymn book than a rock album.

Cave and Warren Ellis produced it, with Ellis sifting 20 tracks from spring 2018 sessions in Brighton before most of the work moved to Woodshed Studios in Malibu, with further stops in Berlin, Los Angeles and London. Drums are used sparingly; synths, piano and Ben Foster's strings, recorded at Air Studios, float everything along. "Spinning Song" opens on a shimmering pulse, "Bright Horses" and "Galleon Ship" are among Cave's most beautiful melodies, and the second half stretches out with the 12-minute title track, the spoken "Fireflies" and the 14-minute "Hollywood."

It reached No. 4 in the UK and was the best-selling LP there in its first week of physical sales. Two songs run past the 12-minute mark, so do pour the tea before side C rather than during.

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