Nick Cave is currently ‘finishing’ a new Bad Seeds album
Cave started writing the follow-up to 2019's 'Ghosteen' at the beginning of 2023
By Emma Wilkes
Nick Cave has revealed that the new Bad Seeds album is almost done.
Cave said last year that he planned to start writing the follow-up to 2019’s Ghosteen once he’d completed his touring commitments. Then, at the beginning of 2023, he confirmed that work was underway on it and publicly shared some of his early lyrics.
“This is both good news and bad news,” Cave told a fan who asked what his plans for 2023 were. “Good news because who doesn’t want a new Bad Seeds record? Bad news because I’ve got to write the bloody thing.”
Now, in a new entry on his Red Hand Files website, Cave told fans that he was to take a short break from replying to questions from fans to finish work on the album.
“Thank you for your kind words,” he told a fan who asked a question about soulmates, “but before I answer I’d like to let everyone know that I am now back in the studio finishing the new Bad Seeds record.
“I will continue to read all the letters that come in, and will be with you in spirit, but my replies may not be that regular or very expansive over the next few weeks.”
Cave had previously revealed he had started writing at precisely 9am on New Years Day. By January 6, he said he had written “a few things” but insisted “they aren’t very good or maybe they are, it’s difficult to tell.”
“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 [Bick] has decamped for a week. Anything that resembles a creative impulse is burrowed way down in some mossy, froggy hole, asleep.”
In an interview with NME this year, Cave said that he didn’t think that he and the band could make “an old-school Bad Seeds record anymore where it’s basically a rock band playing”.
He added: “I don’t see that happening. Not that this next [Bad Seeds] record is ambient – it’s not at all – but I just don’t see us going back to that basic rock’n’roll style. I just don’t know how to do it anymore.”
Cave also suggested he could make a new record with garage rock side project Grinderman. They haven’t made an album together since 2010.