Nick Cave and Warren Ellis have released a new album, Carnage.
Out digitally today, with a physical release set to follow on May 28, the album was recorded by the pair over a period of weeks during the COVID-19 lockdown. It’s the first time Cave and Ellis have recorded a full non-soundtrack album together as a duo away from the Bad Seeds, with Cave describing it as "a brutal but very beautiful record nested in a communal catastrophe." Though recorded quickly, the songs on the album, he says, were born out of early lockdown, which he spent "reading, compulsively writing and just sitting on my balcony thinking about things."
Speaking further about the record, Ellis says: "Making Carnage was an accelerated process of intense creativity.
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."
Cave first teased Carnage last month in a letter shared via his Red Hand Files website. Responding to a fan query about how his lockdown was going, he slipped in the album’s title, saying, "I did go into the studio – with Warren – to make a record."
You can read tQ’s review of Carnage here.
Carnage is out now on Goliath Records Ltd.
