Music

On the sublime Ghosteen—the first album Nick Cave has written and recorded entirely since the death of his teenage son, Arthur, in 2015—he sorts through his grief and all the requisite stages, occasionally as though in real time. His mood drifts between domesticity and depravity. He empathizes with the true believers who wept beneath Jesus’ feet at the crucifixion. He latches onto friendship and love in any shape they take. He loses his faith, then fights desperately for any belief that can replace it. Scored by synthesizers, pianos, and electronics, the process is alternately harrowing and comforting for the first hour of the album, Cave’s waking nightmare on full display. But then, in the album’s final verse, at the close of the dangerous “Hollywood,” he steps back from the edge of a ner...

Coming from a band who, just five months ago, materialized somewhere deep in a forest with a mystical set of songs wrapped in a vast, alien cosmos—a band who, in order to summon the perfect squall of noise, claimed to have suspended an electric guitar from the ceiling of a barn and batted it around like a piñata in a circle of amplifiers—Two Hands is jarringly earthbound. For their latest album, the Brooklyn quartet Big Thief invites you to join them live and unadorned in the studio for the span of 10 songs. “Hand me that cable/Plug into anything,” Adrianne Lenker sings, moments after issuing a more basic instruction: “Cry with me/Cry with me.” Nearly every song overflows with tears and blood, bared teeth and broken tongues; living, killing, dying. There are few overdubs, and sometimes you...

The last chapter of Kim Gordon’s 2015 memoir, Girl in a Band, is a kind of epilogue—a bridge to the next volume in the long life of the indie-rock icon. Sonic Youth is over, and so is Gordon’s marriage to bandmate Thurston Moore. Their daughter, Coco, is off at art school. Gordon has left the family’s brick homestead in Northampton, Massachusetts, but instead of returning to New York, where she was a paragon of Downtown cool since 1981, she heads out to Los Angeles, where she grew up. By the book’s final pages, she is wintering at a hilltop Airbnb in Echo Park—a temporary landing pad for the permanent business of starting over. She is making visual art again; she’s showing in L.A. and has gallery representation in New York. Then, as she sits in someone’s car outside her rental, making out,...