No one who witnessed Nick Cave’s unhinged performances with his band the Birthday Party in the early 1980s would have ever believed that, 40-odd years later, Deutsche Gramophon would release a recording bearing his name. In the catalogue of bizarre and horrific events that was 2020, however, this is one of the lesser shocks.

L.I.T.A.N.I.E.S is a collaboration between Australian singer and songwriter Cave (b. 1957) and Belgian composer Nicholas Lens (b. 1957), perhaps best-known here for his 1994 choral work Flamma Flamma – The Fire Requiem. L.I.T.A.N.I.E.S follows their earlier joint production Shell Shock (2014), an opera dealing with various manifestations of the trauma of war for which Cave wrote the libretto. With L.I.T.A.N.I.E.S, says Lens, “the notes came quickly, almost too fast to write down” as a direct result of COVID-19 and its ensuing lockdowns, restricted movements, fear and terrifying, ongoing confrontation with mortality.

There are 12 litanies (which, intentionally or not, echo structurally the 12 Cantos in...