Nick Cave & The Bad Seeds - Kicking Against The Pricks

Original US pressing of Kicking Against The Pricks. All Greycat rare vinyl releases are verified via matrix runouts.

Condition:
Visually the vinyl looks new. Plays with occasional pops, likely due to pressing. Sleeve is a strong VG+, with slight wear along the edges and small ding in corner preventing NM. Includes original inner sleeve.

Before Murder Ballads. Before The Boatman's Call. Before Nick Cave became an elder statesman of dark music, there was Kicking Against The Pricks.

Released in 1986, this unusual entry in the Bad Seeds catalog finds Cave reinterpreting the songs that helped shape him. Rather than a traditional covers album, Kicking Against The Pricks feels like a guided tour through the darker corners of American folk, blues, country, and rock 'n' roll, filtered entirely through the Bad Seeds' singular vision.

The arrangements transform familiar material into something unmistakably their own. Guitars twang and brood, organs swell with gospel intensity, and the rhythm section moves with a slow, deliberate confidence. Cave's voice occupies center stage throughout, equally capable of tenderness, menace, and black humor, often within the same song.

Tracks from artists such as Johnny Cash, John Lee Hooker, and Velvet Underground are reimagined not as tributes, but as conversations across generations of outsiders and iconoclasts.

This original U.S. pressing on Homestead Records was issued during the band's formative years in America and long eclipsed by later reissues, Homestead editions have become increasingly difficult to source in strong condition. For collectors of early Nick Cave material, this pressing represents a tangible piece of the era when the Bad Seeds were still building their reputation as one of the most compelling and unpredictable bands in alternative music.

Part covers album, part artistic manifesto, Kicking Against The Pricks captures Nick Cave discovering that sometimes the best way to tell your own story is through somebody else's songs.