Two years ago, on an idyllic summer night in Oslo, Norway, Nick Cave and the Bad Seeds were holding a revival. On the surface, it was the long-running group’s headlining set at the Oya Festival, but any Cave experience these days is much more than that.

It wasn’t just because of the four gospel-style backing singers, the hymn-like quality of the slower songs, or Cave’s omnipresent sleek suit and stentorian speak-singing style, which has been compared to that of a preacher for so long that it’s become a clichéd descriptor — even as it has grown closer in tone to the Faulknerian fire and brimstone that influenced so much of his early work. The concert was a rapturous release — from COVID lockdown, yes, but it was also a vivid living symbol of Cave’s return from beneath the dark clouds surrounding the deaths of two of his children as well as his ex-girlfriend and collaborator, Anita Lane.

On this night in Oslo, Cave spent more than half the show at the very edge of the stage, projecting his lyrics directly into the audience’s faces as they grasped his legs and shook his hands. The 10-member Bad Seeds — several of whom have been with him since the ’90s or even the ’80s — roared and soared and soothed with precision along with him, led by the wild-haired violinist Warren Ellis , Cave’s chief collaborator for the past decade. And after a series of understandably subdued and at-times melancholic albums, his latest, “Wild God” — out today (Aug. 30) — continues that openness, unfolding a huge, full-band sound and rousing, almost anthemic choruses about redemption and release, beauty and sadness.

“It’s a joyous record,” he says. “Musically, it’s brimming with life, with energy, with a kind of ecstasy.”

Few would have anticipated such a transformation from him a decade ago, let alone during the unpredictable early days of his career . After all, Cave, now 66, is one of the most commanding musical figures to emerge in the past 40 years — a tall, deep-voiced singer-songwriter-poet-novelist with a famously intimidating aura and songs filled with even more ominous characters. But everything changed in 2015 after he endured every parent’s worst fear: the passing of his 15-year-old son Arthur after a fall during a hike. (His eldest son, Jethro Lazenby, from whom he was initially alienated, passed away in 2022 at the age of 31.)

Since then, a very different Nick Cave has emerged — one who still crafts challenging and introspective work but who has also become a sort of counselor-mentor to an audience he’d previously strived to keep at a distance. It began with his weekly “The Red Hand Files” newsletter (named after his popular 1994 song, featured in “Peaky Blinders”), where he answers often-intense and philosophical questions from fans, many of whom are in mourning, and continued with his 2018-19 “ Conversations With Nick Cave” tour , a sort of live version of the newsletter wherein he’d perform a song and then answer unmoderated, unfiltered questions from audience members. The shows often stretched past three hours.

This has all culminated in a dramatically different kind of fame for Cave, and it’s hard not to perceive the emails, the conversations, the tours, and now the “Wild God” album as a progressively unfolding process of openness and outward expression.

“You might be right,” Cave says, leaning forward in his chair in a downtown New York hotel. “I guess the band and I are moving closer to that [revival] sort of thing all the time. We’ve been making complex records about complex issues, but when we get onstage, it does feel like we’re in direct communication — direct communion, I would say — with the audience. It sort of washes away some of that complexity and turns it into much more of a kind of pure emotional uplift.”

While he describes his songwriting process with Ellis as largely improvisational, Cave says the songs take on a new life with the Bad Seeds in a concert setting. “I feel that music isn’t just entertainment,” he continues. “It’s possibly the last genuine opportunity for transformative experience we have left to us in the secular world. I think that music is a moral force for good — that’s embedded within the nature of music itself: It can make things better, so I take that really seriously.”

That connection with his audience — and his trust in it — becomes even more evident when Cave dismisses any notion that such intimate encounters with fans, especially on his “Conversations” tour, were daring things to do. He’s genuinely puzzled by the word at first — “Why? What’s brave about it?,” he asks — even when it’s clarified to describe the courage it takes to lay oneself so open to virtually any verbal or physical interaction, all in an effort to help people.

“Well, there’s two reasons why you could be brave in these situations,” he says. “One is to stand up and talk openly about matters of grief and things like that. I don’t see that as bravery; I see that as …” He pauses, then continues: “Because [‘Conversations’] wasn’t that long after my son [Arthur] had passed away, I was in a sort of state of madness. I didn’t really know what I was doing. Some people were saying, ‘You’re taking your grief on the road?,’ and others said, ‘You can’t go onstage without moderation because people will ask things that are dangerous to answer; there are certain things you can’t talk about,’ or whatever. But the thing for me was, what could possibly go wrong that hasn’t gone wrong already? What could anyone ask me?” that might hurt more than what he’d already endured. “I didn’t feel brave at all, just consumed by grief, and also bold and empowered to do whatever I wanted, because what’s the worst that could happen?

“I don’t know if it worked,” he concludes, “but it certainly felt like something I needed to do at the time.”

Fair enough — but what, one might ask, did he gain from that tour?

“I think I learned how to express these matters of grief,” he replies slowly, “and I also learned, very much, that I’m part of a larger humanity and connected to people, and that I was not alone in grief — that was very apparent to me once I started. I mean, the number of questions that were like, ‘This empty seat next to me is where my husband should be sitting, but he died two weeks ago,’ and things like that. People may have come explicitly for that reason, but there was so much of it. And so I felt like I was able to turn my insular, inward view of the world — which was very much a self-absorbed kind of place that I’d always inhabited as an artist — and switch it around and look out at the world.

“Now, there’s nothing to suggest that I would know anything more about some of these things than any other person on the street,” he continues. “But [with the Red Hand Files], I’ve been asked the question, so I give it a try. There’s a sort of agony-uncle aspect of it,” he laughs, “and I guess some of it is a kind of preaching. But there’s also a sense of obligation.”

Why?

“Well, that’s a really good question,” he sighs. “They’re really difficult to do — they’re not just one-word answers. They have to be carefully crafted in a way so that they sort of resonate. It gets to the end of the week and I say, ‘Oh fuck, I have to write a Red Hand File.’ But then I read the questions, and eventually one sort of presents itself — ‘I can answer that’ — so I sit down and do it, and I send it to my assistant, who has turned out to be a great editor, and she fixes up bits of it and it goes back and forth. There’s a kind of delight to it — I really enjoy it. Once I’ve got the letter ready and I’m putting it out, there’s a really good feeling about that, too. But the larger motive? I’m not really sure what it is, to be honest. I just feel that I was helped a lot, initially, by people writing to me, and now I can sort of give something back.”

Surprisingly, with such deep and intense subject matter constantly at hand, Cave says the creation of his lyrics is actually quite routine. “I never really know how to answer that question,” he says. “It feels like inspiration has not much to do with anything — rather, it’s just sitting down, day after day, starting at nine o’clock in the morning and getting on with it. Inspiration is way too unreliable.”

So there are no sudden flashes of inspiration in the shower or while out for a walk or anything?

“No, that doesn’t happen,” he says. “My mind just doesn’t work like that, unfortunately. It’s… craft sounds cold, but a great song for me feels like a kind of blend of small, even flawed ideas. I just write lots of things, most of which aren’t very good, and I fill up my book in that way. Some lines just kind of stick around, and they seem to gather meaning as you keep going back to them. And then you find you can take this line here and this line from over here that has nothing to do with the other line, and put them together, and suddenly it’s like, wow, that’s sort of vibrating in some kind of way. And then I put this other line with them, and songs grow in that way. But I don’t ever sit down with a preconceived idea of writing about something.”

Having unleashed “Wild God” upon the world, the Bad Seeds will embark on a tour in September that begins in Germany and spans across Europe for two months, followed by North America and Australia and New Zealand. And as unrestrained as the shows can get, as dark or unsettling as the music might be, Cave’s work is now about embracing the light.

“If anything, it’s an attempt to steer people away from a bitter, cynical perspective on life,” he says. “It’s a move towards faith, let’s say, rather than the opposite. It’s somehow, I guess, promoting the idea that we have value as human beings, that the world has an inherent meaning, and that the world is not hopeless — it’s beautiful! This has become a highly controversial stance in some circles: A lot of people who write in are like, ‘No, you’ve got this wrong. This world isn’t that way at all, and I’ve personally arrived at this position through being hurt,’ or through a catastrophic event or some kind of devastation.

“But I think viewing the world with skepticism is a luxury you can afford before tragedy strikes,” he concludes. “And the devastation either breaks you — or it forces you to see the world in a new light, as something incredibly beautiful.”