Kicking Against the Pricks is the third studio album released by the Australian rock band Nick Cave and the Bad Seeds. First released in 1986, the album is a collection of Cave's interpretations of songs by other artists. The title is a reference to a biblical quote from the King James Version of the Christian Bible, Acts 26, verse 14.

The album marked the Bad Seeds debut of drummer Thomas Wydler, expanding the Bad Seeds line-up to Cave (vocals and keyboards), Wydler, bassist Barry Adamson, and guitarists Mick Harvey and Blixa Bargeld.

Cave would later downplay the importance of the record, but said it helped the band develop musically:

It allowed us to discover different elements, to actually make and perform a variety of different sorts of music successfully. I think that helped subsequent records tremendously.

Remarking on the song selection, Cave said:

They were all done for different reasons. Basically a list of songs were made and we tried to play them. We tried songs by the Loved Ones and the Saints and all sorts of people that never got on the record. Some songs were tributes, like the Tom Jones song ["Sleeping Annaleah"]; other songs we didn't think the song was ever done particularly well in the first place. Some songs had just kind of haunted my childhood, like "The Carnival Is Over", which I always loved.

The strings were arranged by Harvey and played by the Berliner Kaffeehausmusik Ensemble. "The Hammer Song" is not to be confused with the song of the same name from the Bad Seeds' sixth studio album The Good Son (1990).

Andrea Enthal in Spin described the album as '[it] has moments, but overall it's a dready, self-indulgent blob'.