For a week during lockdown, Nick Cave wrote one original psalm each day, meditating on themes like faith, grief and praise. Set to amorphous arrangements from Cave and long-time creative partner Warren Ellis (The Bad Seeds, Dirty Three), these short spoken-word pieces evoke intimate theatre as much as they do private poetry. “I am the mist maker moving through the throng/A cloud of carnage everywhere I roam,” Cave pronounces on the apocalyptic “Have Mercy on Me”, before changing tack to make a plea for compassion. Cave has long taken influence from the Bible for his lyrics, and here the music follows suit in the angelic organ shading “How Long Have I Waited?” and the synthetic choral tinges of “Splendour, Glorious Splendour”. The delicate life-and-death study “Such Things Should Never Happen” echoes tragedies from Cave’s own family, yet it’s ultimately warm and hopeful. A nearly 12-minute instrumental follows the psalms, moving between ambient ethereality and more substantial turns. It’s more open to interpretation than the rest of the project, while still conveying a sense of release.