Nick Cave / Warren Ellis - Carnage

Carnage is a new album by Nick Cave and Warren Ellis, recorded over a period of weeks during lockdown. It's the work of two collaborative artists who are in the midst of a later-period renaissance that has spawned powerful, evocative music that speaks to its time without being confined to the crises that sparked its creation.

Although the pair have composed & recorded many soundtracks together, and Warren is a long-term member of The Bad Seeds, this is the first time they have released an entire album of new songs as a duo.

Nick Cave describes the album as, “a brutal but very beautiful record nested in a communal catastrophe.”

“Making Carnage was an accelerated process of intense creativity,” says Warren Ellis, “the eight songs were there in one form or another within the first two and a half days.”

Nick Cave’s cinematic work with his bandmate Warren Ellis is a slight departure from last decade’s trilogy of albums. It’s defined by its stark contrasts, at turns brutal, surreal, and romantic. There is greater sense of spontaneous energy in Carnage than in much of Cave's music of this period. It's constructed of something both beautiful and visceral, tender and blood-thirsty, wholly terrifying and completely absorbing.

Heavyweight vinyl produced by Goliath Records in 2021. Embossed outer-sleeve.