There is a shot in Peaky Blinders: The Immortal Man, the film that arrived on Netflix on March 20th, where Tommy Shelby rides on horseback through the mud, covered in the damage of everything the series has put him through. Battered, older, barely holding together. And then the song starts. Not at the beginning, not when Tommy first appears. The filmmakers held it back deliberately, letting the tension build until the moment the music could mean something.

The song is “Red Right Hand.” Nick Cave re-recorded it for this film. He was 66 when he made this new version, and the three decades that separate it from the original 1994 recording are audible in every note.

Cillian Murphy, who has played Tommy Shelby since 2013, explained in a clip released by Netflix that the decision to use Cave at his current age was deliberate. They wanted him singing it “at his age now,” with a voice that is “broken and shattered.” Fontaines D.C. frontman Grian Chatten, who contributed his own song “Puppet” to the soundtrack, put it another way: hearing Cave voice the theme again meant “listening to the new details of his voice, to discover how much time had passed, not only for him, but for Tommy.”

That is a precise and accurate description of what this new version does. The original “Red Right Hand” was a gothic romp, dramatic and menacing but with a certain theatrical energy that matched the 1994 moment it came from. The Bad Seeds were in their imperial phase, Cave was operating at peak swagger and doom, and the track felt like a perfectly constructed villain entrance cue. It worked spectacularly as the Peaky Blinders theme because it captured something about Tommy Shelby that words alone could not.

The new version strips that theatrical energy away. What remains is slower, more spectral, and considerably more tired in the best possible sense. Cave sounds like someone who has survived things. The specific things are his own, documented in his music and public statements over the past decade, but the texture of that survival is present in the recording. When he sings the line about the “tall handsome man in a long black coat,” the ambiguity that was always latent in the original becomes something heavier. Who exactly is he singing about? Is he singing about Tommy, or about himself, or about some universal figure of reckoning? The new version refuses to settle the question.

The Peaky Blinders soundtrack has always been one of the more musically ambitious in television history. Creator Steven Knight chose songs not for brand recognition but for emotional fit, which is how a show about 1920s Birmingham gangsters ended up with PJ Harvey, Arctic Monkeys, and Nick Cave all finding a home within the same narrative. The Immortal Man continues that tradition with Fontaines D.C. contributing original material, Amy Taylor of Amyl and the Sniffers contributing a track, and Irish folk-doom band Lankum also represented.

Chatten has spoken about receiving Murphy visit to an intimate Fontaines D.C. show for Romance, and Murphy telling him afterward that the music sounded like it had been written for Peaky Blinders. That instinct proved correct. Chatten song “Puppet” sits in the film with a naturalistic fit that is hard to manufacture.

But it is Cave who closes the loop. The series began with his voice and it ends with it, a different voice now, singing the same words differently, because he is different and because Tommy is different and because everyone who has spent twelve years watching this story has changed in ways they may not be fully aware of. That is what the best soundtrack choices do. They do not just accompany a scene. They tell you something about time.

“Red Right Hand” in 1994 was a threat. “Red Right Hand” in 2026 is a reckoning. Both versions are the same song. The distance between them is everything.