To be truthful, it’s still a little difficult to know exactly where to place Push The Sky Away. Having been only released in February of 2013, this one is still settling in and revealing itself to Nick Cave’s audience. Still, every time I really sit and listen through the entire album, I come away with the unshakable impression that Push The Sky Away is yet another masterpiece, and one of the finest albums of the year. Though Cave was clearly busy with other pursuits (his ongoing work scoring films with Warren Ellis, and the second Grinderman album in 2010), the five-year interval between Dig, Lazarus, Dig!!! and Push The Sky Away is the longest break between any two Bad Seeds albums. Moreover, following the departure of Mick Harvey from the band in 2009, it was almost anyone’s guess what a new Bad Seeds album might sound like. Remember that Harvey was not only the sole remaining founding member of the Bad Seeds from way back in ’83, but he and Cave had been in bands together ever since the earliest incarnation of the Boys Next Door from their school days in 1973. The severing of an artistic partnership that lasted that long is bound to have repercussions.

And of course, it does. The most immediately noticeable thing about Push The Sky Away is, basically, Harvey’s absence. Not just his absence, per se, but the absence of guitar. Warren Ellis is credited with providing some tenor guitar, and a guest player named George Vjestica plays a 12-string acoustic guitar on two songs, but beyond that, the absence of a dedicated guitar player opens up a fascinating textural vacuum in the Bad Seeds’ sound, and Push The Sky Away spends nearly all of its time exploring the new possibilities of that vacated post.

What this means, in large part, is that Push The Sky Away is the sparsest, most spacious, and most restrained Bad Seeds album ever. Certainly it’s more restrained than The Good Son and Your Funeral… My Trial, and possibly even more so than The Boatman’s Call, but despite this ghostly touch, the band still exudes considerable menace. Martyn Casey’s throbbing bass on “Water’s Edge” is hugely threatening, as Cave’s piano shades the edges of lines, and Thomas Wydler’s drums dart in and out with soft but free jazz fills. Casey’s bass on “We Real Cool” is even more central, plucking the same rhythm on one note for the song’s full duration.

One of the most impressive aspects of Push The Sky Away, then, is the way that the Bad Seeds still wring great drama from such a restricted dynamic range. In the rare instances where a song crescendos, even though the difference between the quiet and intense sections is quite small, the corresponding contrast lands with greater force because of how the listener’s expectations have been recalibrated. “Jubilee Street” is probably the best example of this, because it gradually adds in layers of guitar, strings, and a children’s choir, all before you’ve really realized what’s happening.

Apart from “Jubilee Street,” “Higgs Boson Blues” is arguably the album’s centerpiece, and while it remains as inscrutable a chronicle of Cave’s worldview and the tumultuous uncertainty of modern life as anything the man has yet penned, it’s a fascinating pool of shimmering words to dive into, referencing Robert Johnson’s deal with the devil, the Lorraine Motel (where Martin Luther King was assassinated), missionaries bearing smallpox, and, yes, both Hannah Montana and Miley Cyrus. I haven’t the faintest clue what Cave is talking about, but his vocal delivery crests and falls along with the band while he waxes in desperate, loping phrases, punctuated by “Can you feel my heart beat?” and “I can’t remember anything at all.” Maybe it’s all a fever dream, then — the song, the album, life, everything. And then, with an immaculate hush, the title track obliterates one’s sensual bearings and seems, beyond all reason, to be a simple plea for perseverance, even in the face of utter exhaustion and resignation. The song fades out, but Cave is still singing: “You’ve gotta just keep on pushing/ Push the sky away.”

Push The Sky Away is a tremulous album, a candle near an open window always just on the verge of winking out. Its atmosphere is utterly unique in the Bad Seeds’ catalog, and it exudes a dark, fatalistic attraction, like a black hole beckoning home a derelict satellite. For those of us happy to bask in the fell penumbra of its gravity well, let’s hope the Bad Seeds find a way to push that sky a little further down the line.