Nick Cave, mysterious countdown: album announcement tonight?

“Wild god”: Nick Cave is coming back

He announced it himself, starting yesterday evening: a link posted on social media that referred to his official website, with a countdown, which pointed to 6.15pm Italian time today, March 6th. The thing you notice is that in transparency on the white page you can read “Wild god”: it will, in all likelihood, be the title of the single or album of Nick Cave's return with the Bad Seeds.

An interesting suggestion: a few days ago, on his “Red hand files” he responded to a fan who asked him about his relationship with God – and in particular about the fact that he is represented as a man:

When I speak of God, I am not speaking of a vague and airy “spiritual” force, rather I am speaking of the God of the Bible. In the Bible, God is represented as a man: God, the Father. (…)
God is an unnameable and incomprehensible abstraction, and we struggle with the inadequacy of our language to give form to this abstraction.

The new album, which Cave has been talking about for some time, would be the first work with the Bad Seeds in almost 5 years, since “Ghosteen” (released in autumn 2019), which followed “Skeleton tree” (2016). Both works were definitely influenced by the death of his son: they are dark, sparse albums: almost more of a duo work with Warren Ellis than one with the band – unlike the masterpiece “Push the sky away” of 2013, where the Bad Seeds they really feel it. The live story, however, is different: the last Italian concerts with the band were in 2022, a recovery of those from 2020, and there the impact, intensity and strength were different compared to the recordings.

The album with the Bad Seeds has been in the works since late 2022, when Cave announced plans to start working on new releases later that year. A few months later, the musician then often updated fans via the Red Hand Files, announcing that he had finished and mixed the album between the summer and autumn.

Between 2019 and 2023 Cave released several albums: in addition to the “B-Sides & Rarities (Part II)” project, in 2020 there was the concert film transformed into a live album “Idiot prayer” (with reinterpretations for piano and voice of the repertoire, in solitude), which was followed by a joint album with Warren Ellis, “Carnage” (2021), which in turn became a live album last summer (“Australian carnage”, 2023). Not to mention another 2022 EP, “Seven Psalms”, a soundtrack, a film called “This much I know to be true” about the creative relationship with Warren Ellis, two books, “Faith, Hope and Carnage” with Sean O' Hagan and “The little thing is sad”, a children's publication. In addition to having opened a shop, “Cave things”, and maintaining a compelling dialogue with fans through the Red Hand Files.

But the return of the Bad Seeds is another story: the new album is one of the most anticipated in the rock and songwriting world of 2024.