Songfacts®:

• Nick Cave forgets most of what this song is about, but the forgetting is the song's story.
  
  Cave wrote "Heart That Kills You" shortly after the 2015 death of his 15-year-old son Arthur. In Issue 171 (November 2021) of his Red Hand Files fan mailer, he explained that grief drove out most of his memories for a couple years after his son's passing.
  
  "Part of my own experience of grief has been a kind of forgetting," Cave wrote, "where significant portions of my life following Arthur's death seem largely lost to me, or rather so misremembered that they have little relation to the truth."
  
  In trying to remember the song's meaning, Cave wrote that he suspects it was a fragment left over from the making of Ghosteen, his 17th studio album.
• Adam watches his little Eve
  Sleeping in a grief of snow
  
  The Biblical allusion in this reference isn't as important as it may seem - at least not as far as Cave remembers. It simply refers to the archetype of marriage and stands as a metaphor for Cave and his wife, Susie.
  
  They've been kicked out of Eden by serpents and "stepped from the garden into LA," which was literally what Cave and Susie did after Arthur's death. They moved from Brighton, England, to Los Angeles, where they tried to find some peace. They soon decided no geographic location could get them away from their pain and moved back to Brighton, though they also spend a lot of time in London "in a tiny, secret, pink house, where we are mostly happy."
• The song ends with the line, "Into old and angry age." The sentiment ended up being inaccurate. In age, Nick and Susie Cave found a happiness they'd never had before. Previously angered at the "casual indifference" with which the world treated human suffering, they found love growing in its place, for they realized they couldn't be so angered at injustice if they didn't first love the world so much.