What is the worst that can happen? And what happens after the worst does? Nick Cave, leader of the Bad Seeds, his band of over 30 years, has had to endure the triple bind of unimaginable tragedy, processing grief as a public figure and – more recently – the task of metabolising that suffering into some kind of continued artistic existence. Had Cave gone to ground indefinitely after the death of his teenage son Arthur in 2015, everyone would have he released an album in 2016, Skeleton Tree – a work digested by fans in the shadow of the event, but largely written before it – and an accompanying documentary, the visually lyrical One More Time With Feeling, which dealt with the aftermath of Arthur’s year, Cave did two more barely imaginable things: he started an ask-me-anything online forum called the Red Hand Files where he candidly discussed his own state of mind and handed out sage advice like the most sublime of agony uncles. Then Cave took the whole process on tour, embarking on an extraordinary series of solo dates in which he mixed song with questions from the audience. That this formerly forbidding bard of lust and brimstone, violence and tenderness, was trading in his artistic aloofness for a purgative communion marked one of the most remarkable evolutions in rock. “Nothing can go wrong, because everything has gone wrong,” he noted in there is Ghosteen, a double album about a wandering spirit in which Cave invokes the gravitas of the late Leonard Cohen and the hoarse, harsh beauty of latterday Scott Walker. You might have thought bereavement might have unleashed a raging, vengeful beast within Cave – there is a cougar on this album, prowling the perimeter of a California compound, “with a terrible engine of wrath for a heart”, but it is the sole irruption here of the old, Old Testament to these 11 songs requires a ready supply of absorbent materials, some rehydration salts – it is so very sad – and perhaps a metaphysician on call. Quite apart from the devastation in its recurrent themes – Jesus in his mother’s arms, blackened butterflies, stairways to heaven, a malevolent, Pied Piper-like sun that steals children away – Ghosteen is an album about the very nature of what is real and what is not, and who is to Horses, one of the most beautiful songs here, sets loose metaphorical horses of love with “manes full of fire” into an apocalyptic landscape. But then Cave reins them back in.“And we’re all so sick and tired of seeing things as they are,” he aches, “The horses are just horses and their manes aren’t full of fire, and the fields are just fields and there ain’t no Lord.”Watch an album trailer for though, feels the continued presence of his son, “a little white shape dancing at the end of the world”. Cave assures us he’s coming home “on the train”. Why not believe in ghosts? “There’s nothing wrong with loving something you can’t hold in your hand,” Cave muses, on the title track. And Arthur’s analogue, the Ghosteen, appears from time to time, to say: “I am beside you.”As to where we go when we die, this career-long purveyor of religious imagery doesn’t tackle that directly. “We are here, and you are where you are,” he puts it movingly, on a song called Fireflies, the first sign of this new album, its lyrics released via the Red Hand Files a year album’s vivid cover art, meanwhile, is a kitsch paradise by the artist Tom du Bois in which flamingos frolic and lions lie down with lambs, signalling a radical change of emotional landscape for the Bad Seeds. And yet Ghosteen completes a trilogy of records connected by their sound: Push the Sky Away (2013), Skeleton Tree and Ghosteen are all keening, subliminally orchestral works, swirling with electronic mood music; they supersede the rock format and solo piano of previous Bad Seeds or Cave solo works, underscoring the cornerstone presence of violinist Warren Ellis, who also provides revelatory backing takes a moment to decipher Cave’s explanation that the songs on Part One are the children, and the songs on Part Two are their parents. These are not two sets of songs sung from generational points of view, but rather, Ghosteen’s second half contains the seeds of its first: the songs of Part One may have been spun off from Part Two. Photograph: Matthew ThorneUltimately, all are visions, alternately haunted and comforting. Subtle evolutions in mood and instrumentation come to peaks that are made all the more stunning by their scarcity. There are pianos, but the exhausted trope of the sad piano ballad is nowhere to be found. A luminous, Kraftwerk-like sheen distinguishes the title track itself; on Night Raid, a bell of sorts tolls. At its very climax, the catastrophic moment where a small child abandons his bucket and spade and “climbs into the sun”, the final track collapses in on itself, a pulsating, flickering black hole of electronic absence that is more astonishing than any cheap pile-on of is still Cave, though. This rollercoaster ride comes bookended by two fables. Spinning Song takes an Elvis-like character and plants a tree in his garden: the launch of a suite of songs with all the force of myth, in which a flotilla of galleons sails into the predawn air and sea creatures are sprung from the deep. In among all this hallucinatory elegance sit everyday vignettes: listening to the radio in the kitchen, sitting in a car the end, Cave reprises the Buddhist tale of Kisa Gotami, a heartbroken mother combing each house in a village for a mustard seed with which to save her child, the Buddha’s proviso being that the seeds had to come from houses where there had not been a can’t find a single one. No one is untouched by loss. And this album finds Cave comforted by the universality of suffering, and the succour of those who gathered around him. “For we are not alone it seems, so many riders in the sky,” Cave observes on Galleon Ship. On Ghosteen Speaks, the spirit notes: “I think my friends have gathered here for me.”