[5] Much of their early material is set in a mythic American Deep South, drawing on spirituals and Delta blues, while Cave's preoccupation with Old Testament notions of good versus evil culminated in what has been called his signature song, "The Mercy Seat" (1988), and in his debut novel, And the Ass Saw the Angel (1989).

His more recent musical work features ambient and electronic elements, as well as increasingly abstract lyrics, informed in part by grief over his son Arthur's 2015 death, which is explored in the documentary One More Time with Feeling (2016) and the Bad Seeds' 2019 album Ghosteen.

[13] Through his older brother, Cave became a fan of British progressive rock bands such as King Crimson, Pink Floyd and Jethro Tull,[14] while a childhood girlfriend introduced him to the Canadian folk artist Leonard Cohen, who he later described as "the greatest songwriter of them all".

The Boys Next Door emerged as the linchpin of the Melbourne post-punk scene in the late 1970s, securing a residency at St Kilda's Crystal Ballroom venue, where they attracted a cult following.

They struggled initially with financial instability and limited connections, and grew to detest London and much of its music scene, which Cave later described as "dead, ... we felt really ripped off, robbed".

[25] Though their sound tends to change considerably from one album to another, the one constant of the band is an unpolished blending of disparate genres, and song structures which provide a vehicle for Cave's virtuosic, frequent histrionics.

Critics Stephen Thomas Erlewine and Steve Huey wrote: "With the Bad Seeds, Cave continued to explore his obsessions with religion, death, love, America, and violence with a bizarre, sometimes self-consciously eclectic hybrid of blues, gospel, rock, and arty post-punk.

In a September 2013 interview, Cave explained that he returned to using a typewriter for songwriting after his experience with their twelfth studio album Nocturama (2003), as he "could walk in on a bad day and hit 'delete' and that was the end of it".

Other films that use Cave's songs include The Freshman (1990), Gas Food Lodging (1992), Box of Moonlight (1996), Kevin & Perry Go Large (2000), Mr In-Between (2001), Romance & Cigarettes (2005), Cirque du Freak: The Vampire's Assistant (2009) and About Time (2013).

"Red Right Hand" is the theme song for Peaky Blinders, which also features cover versions by artists such as his ex-partner PJ Harvey, Arctic Monkeys, Laura Marling, Iggy Pop and Jarvis Cocker of Pulp, Patti Smith and Anna Calvi.

In a 2019 interview with Vice, Cillian Murphy, who plays Tommy Shelby in Peaky Blinders, mentioned that Cave personally approved the use of the song for the series after watching a pre-screening of the show.

[38] During the 1982 recording sessions for the Birthday Party's third studio album Junkyard, Cave, together with band-mates Harvey and Howard, joined members of the Go-Betweens to form Tuff Monks.

In the immediate aftermath of the Birthday Party's break-up, Cave performed several shows in the United States as part of the Immaculate Consumptive, a short-lived "super-group" with Lunch, Marc Almond and Clint Ruin.

[58] By the time Dominik's film was released, Hillcoat was preparing his next project, The Road, an adaptation of Cormac McCarthy's novel about a father and son struggling to survive in a post-apocalyptic world.

This was followed up with King Ink II in 1997, containing lyrics, poems, and the transcript of a radio essay he wrote for the BBC in July 1996, "The Flesh Made Word", discussing in biographical format his relationship with Christianity.

"Swampland", from Mutiny, in particular, uses the same linguistic stylings ('mah' for 'my', for instance) and some of the same themes (the narrator being haunted by the memory of a girl called Lucy, being hunted like an animal, approaching death and execution).

[67] In 2015 he released the book The Sick Bag Song, followed in 2022 by Faith, Hope, and Carnage, collected from a series of phone conversations conducted between Cave and Irish writer Sean O'Hagan during the COVID-19 pandemic.

[72] His interest in the work of Edward Gorey led to his participation in the BBC Radio 3 programme Guest + Host = Ghost, featuring Peter Blegvad and the radiophonic sound of the Langham Research Centre.

[78] Cave wrote a screenplay titled The Wettest County in the World,[79] which was used for the 2012 film Lawless, directed again by John Hillcoat, starring Tom Hardy and Shia LaBeouf.

On the page, Cave discusses various issues ranging from art, religion, current affairs and music, as well as using it as a free platform in which fans are encouraged to ask personal questions on any topic of their choosing.

[81][82] Cave's intimate approach to the Question & Answer format on The Red Hand Files was praised by The Guardian as "a shelter from the online storm free of discord and conspiracies, and in harmony with the internet vision of Tim Berners-Lee.

[93] A number of prominent noise rock vocalists have cited Cave's Birthday Party-era work as their primary influence, including the U-Men's John Bigley,[94] and David Yow, frontman of Scratch Acid and the Jesus Lizard.

[99] In 2017, Cave reportedly told GQ magazine that he and his family were considering moving from Brighton to Los Angeles as, after the death of his 15-year-old son, Arthur, they "just find it too difficult to live here.

Although his life during that time was admittedly "a terrible shambles", his second decade of addiction was much more stable and characterised by regularly taking heroin in the morning and in the evening and being able to work on writing during the day.

In 2023, Cave wrote on his blog that he had sympathised with feminist author Ayaan Hirsi Ali's conversion from Islam to atheism after reading her book Infidel: My Life (2006), and had also considered himself an atheist.

He also clarified his view on Christianity was "non-political and fully personal and emotional" and described his religious beliefs as "bound up in the liturgy and the ritual and the poetry that swirls around the restless, tortured figure of Jesus, as presented within the sacred domain of the church itself.

"[130] In 2019, Cave wrote in defence of singer Morrissey of the Smiths after the latter expressed a series of controversial political statements during the release of his solo studio album California Son which led to some record stores refusing to stock it.

"[81] In 2020, Cave also expressed opposition to ostracism, particularly cancel culture, and misguided political correctness, describing both as "bad religion run amuck" and their "refusal to engage with uncomfortable ideas has an asphyxiating effect on the creative soul of a society.

[134] He has also argued against boycotting musicians for controversial actions or political opinions while giving a lecture at the Hay Festival in 2023, saying that audiences should not "eradicate the best of these people in order to punish the worst of them.

He also stated that his small-c conservative views had formed following the deaths of two of his sons, explaining "I think that I have an understanding of loss and what it is to lose something and how difficult it is to get that back" and argued that the demise of religion and spirituality "which may or may not be a good thing" had led to a "vacuum that we created that we don't really know what to do with".