Ushering in the year he knelt down / And crushed his brother’s head with a bone are the first lyrics gothic rocker Nick Cave said he wrote in 2023.
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In a recent edition of his newsletter, the “Red Right Hand” artist revealed his plans to begin writing a new album with the Bad Seeds, a band he has fronted since the ’80s.
“My plan for this year is to make a new record with the Bad Seeds,” he wrote to fans. “This is both good news and bad news. Good news because who doesn’t want a new Bad Seeds record? Bad news because I’ve got to write the bloody thing.”
Cave explained he started the songwriting process first thing in the morning on Jan. 1. “It is now January 6th—nearly a week has passed and I’ve written a few things but they aren’t very good, or maybe they are, it’s difficult to tell,” he detailed.
“A kind of doldrums has set in, perennial and predictable,” he continued, laying bare his current songwriting struggles. “It’s the same with every record, I feel that familiar feeling of lack, like I’m a big, dumb blank thing in a suit. I’m grumpy as fuck and Susie has decamped for a week. Anything that resembles a creative impulse is burrowed way down in some mossy, froggy hole, asleep, I hope, not dead. I have to call it forth, provoke it from its slumber. It becomes a nasty, punishing, baggy-eyed business. I’m starting to get an infuriating sing-song voice in my head that actually rhymes, like a madness. Like sadness.”
A new Nick Cave & The Bad Seeds album would be the band’s first in four years. Their last LP, Ghosteen, was released in 2019, which was then followed up in 2021 with the compilation release of B-Sides & Rarities (Part II). Cave has since kept busy, working on several solo projects, including a 2021 collaborative album, Carnage, with Warren Ellis, a 2022 spoken-word record, Seven Psalms, and, most recently, a memoir, titled Faith, Hope and Carnage.
Cave first confirmed plans to begin work on a new album in late 2022, revealing during a Q&A at the London Literature Festival, “The thing is, [an album is] coming, and I know what that involves. It’s about a man sitting down in his space and confronting a complete lack of ideas about things. I don’t collect ideas, I don’t write things down or get a cool title, or whatever. I don’t do that stuff. I just make a date and sit down and start to write a record.”
Photo by David Wolff -Patrick/Redferns
