The Birthday Party (originally known as The Boys Next Door) were an Australian post-punk band, active from 1978 to 1983. Despite limited commercial success, The Birthday Party's influence has been far-reaching, and they have been called "one of the darkest and most challenging post-punk groups to emerge in the early '80s." The group's "bleak and noisy soundscapes," which drew irreverently on blues, free jazz, and rockabilly, provided the setting for vocalist Nick Cave's disturbing tales of violence and perversion. Their music has been described by critic Simon Reynolds as gothic, and their single "Release the Bats" was particularly influential on the emerging gothic scene.

The Boys Next Door's best known song, "Shivers", written by Howard, and first performed and recorded by his band The Young Charlatans, was banned by radio stations because of a reference to suicide. After recordings and moderate success in Australia (including hundreds of live shows) they headed for London in 1980, changed their name to The Birthday Party and launched into a period of innovative and aggressive music-making. Some sources say the band took its new name from the Harold Pinter play The Birthday Party; others (including Ian Johnston's Cave biography) state it was prompted by Cave misremembering, or intentionally misattributing, the name to a non-existent birthday party scene in the Dostoyevsky novel Crime and Punishment. In a 2008 interview, Rowland S. Howard gave his own recollection: "The name The Birthday Party came up in conversation between Nick and myself. There's this apocryphal story about it coming from a Dostoyevsky novel. It may have had various connotations, but what he and I spoke about was a sense of celebration and making things into more an occasion and ritual". They resided in London, with trips back to Australia and tours through Europe and the U.S. before relocating to West Berlin in 1982.  Above the barely-controlled racket, Cave's vocals ranged from desperate to simply menacing and demented. Critics have written that "neither John Cale nor Alfred Hitchcock was ever this scary," and that Cave "doesn't so much sing his vocals as expel them from his gut". Though Cave drew on earlier rock and roll shriekers--especially Iggy Pop and Suicide's Alan Vega--his singing with the Birthday Party remains powerful and distinct. His lyrics also drew on Arthur Rimbaud and Charles Baudelaire.  The single "Release the Bats" came out during the emergence of the gothic scene. This song about "vampire sex" was promoted by an advertisement with the words "Dirtiness is next to antigodliness".  Their 1982 album Junkyard was inspired by American Southern Gothic imagery, dealing with extreme subjects like an evangelist's murdered daughter.

did their style change over time?
his singing with the Birthday Party remains powerful and distinct.