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Artist News Releases
Nick Cave and Warren Ellis release lockdown album Carnage
By Andy Malt | Published on Friday 26 February 2021
Nick Cave and Warren Ellis have surprised released their new album, ‘Carnage’, which they recorded during lockdown. Although they have worked together on several film soundtrack projects, and for nearly three decades in Nick Cave And The Bad Seeds, this is the first time they have released a standalone album as a duo.
“Making ‘Carnage’ was an accelerated process of intense creativity”, says Ellis. “The eight songs were there in one form or another within the first two and a half days”. Meanwhile, Cave adds that the album is “a brutal but very beautiful record nested in a communal catastrophe”.
Although the release was a surprise, we did know this album was incoming. Cave first revealed that he and Ellis had recorded a new record together in January, via a post on his Red Hand Files website discussing the effect that lockdown had had on him.
“In many ways lockdown has felt weirdly familiar, like I’ve experienced it before”, he said in the post. “I guess this should come as no surprise as I was a heroin addict for many years and self-isolating and social distancing were the name of the game. I am also well acquainted with the mechanics of grief – collective grief works in an eerily similar way to personal grief, with its dark confusion, deep uncertainty and loss of control”.
“I am surprised, though, at just how hard not being able to play live has felt”, he went on. “I have come to the conclusion that I am essentially a thing that tours. There is a terrible yearning and a feeling of a life being half-lived. I miss the thrill of stepping onto the stage, the rush of the performance, where all other concerns dissolve into a pure animal interrelation with my audience”.
Available now from all good streaming and download emporiums, ‘Carnage’ will also be available on CD and vinyl from 28 May.
A track from another Warren Ellis project is also out today – that being the latest single from Marianne Faithful, ‘She Walks In Beauty’. The track is a reading of a Lord Byron poem, and features on a new album of the same name, which is out on 30 Apr. With music from Ellis throughout, the album features various other guests, including Nick Cave.
