Nick Cave

Nick Cave & Warren Ellis surprise-release new album 'CARNAGE'

Nick Cave recently revealed that he and his Bad Seeds bandmate Warren Ellis made a new album together called CARNAGE. It seemed at first like he was implying that it’s a Bad Seeds album, though actually it’s credited to just Nick Cave and Warren Ellis — their first non-soundtrack album as a duo — and it was just surprise-released today.

“Making Carnage was an accelerated process of intense creativity,” Warren said. “The eight songs were there in one form or another within the first two-and-a-half days and then it was, ‘let’s just make a record!’ There was nothing too premeditated about it.” Nick calls it “a brutal but very beautiful record nested in a communal catastrophe.”

The album gets a vinyl/CD release on May 28 via Goliath Records (pre-order), but it’s out now digitally, and I’m listening as I write this and it sounds pretty fantastic so far. More upbeat than the meditative songs on 2019’s Ghosteen but still with that same suspenseful energy and the late-career boost in creativity that Nick has been having since 2013’s Push The Sky Away. Listen below.

You can read all of the album’s lyrics here.

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