The fifth track from Nick Cave & The Bad Seeds' 2016 album Skeleton Tree. The title, “Anthrocene”, is a variant of the proposed scientific term Anthropocene (from Greek anthro- or anthropo- meaning “man” and -cene meaning “new” or “era”).

“Anthropocene” refers to the modern geological era, when human activities such as burning fossil fuels began to have a significant impact on the Earth.

While the concept “anthropocene” began as an academic model, its use has broadened to literature, art, and even popular culture. Its use by Cave on Skeleton Tree somehow seems analogous to the song “Higgs Boson Blues” from his previous album, Push the Sky Away, where an arcane, but newsworthy, idea is treated as a metaphorical device to draw out the composer’s profound emotions. In “Higgs Boson Blues,” particle physics is used to highlight culture’s strange ability to compress space and time into a dense, meaningless void. In “Anthrocene,” Cave seems to draw an ironic parallel between the evolutionary effect of man on his environment while singing about what it means to be eternally human — love, loss, longing.