Red Right Hand

Nick Cave has spent forty years constructing a mythology around himself — preacher, murderer, romantic, elegist — and no song makes that mythology feel more inevitable than Red Right Hand. The 1994 single is part folk ballad, part Flannery O'Connor, part Paradise Lost: a figure of biblical menace moving through a landscape of moral terror.

The orchestration — Warren Ellis's strings, the marching-band percussion, Cave's baritone sermon — creates something that feels like it arrived from outside rock music. The song has appeared in Scream, Peaky Blinders, and dozens of other placements, each confirming it was always already cultural furniture.

Cave and Ellis have continued as Bad Seeds and as a duo. Their recent work — Skeleton Tree and Ghosteen — is among the most profound music made in response to grief in recent memory.