Nick Cave launches mysterious countdown clock

NME

Nick Cave has launched a mysterious countdown clock, but it has not been revealed what will happen when the clock strikes zero.

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Fans who visit the musician’s website will find a 24-hour clock ticking down. As it stands, the countdown will finish at 17:15 GMT tomorrow (March 6), or 12:15 ET/09:15 PT in the United States.

Cave has also posted a link to the site on his social media channels, with fans starting to speculate that it might refer to a possible announcement about a new album.

The first word of a new Nick Cave & The Bad Seeds album came back in October 2022 when he confirmed in a Q&A that he was about to start the writing process. He later said that the eventual writing processed commenced at 9am on New Year’s Day 2023.

In July last year, he wrote on his site that they were “finishing” work on recording the new album, and then in November, Cave said he was about to start mixing on the record in Buffalo.

Speaking to NME last summer, Cave described the new material as “just so instantly interesting” as well as “different all the time”. He also 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.”

The most recent Nick Cave & The Bad Seeds album was 2019’s ‘Ghosteen’. In a glowing five-star review, NME wrote: “‘Ghosteen’ is one of the most devastatingly accurate accounts of grief that you’ll ever listen to. Yet it’s also, astoundingly, one of the most comforting. Few mediations on grief manage to navigate despair and catharsis as well as this.”

It is also possible that the countdown clock is referring to an entirely different project. Cave and Warren Ellis, are, for example, scoring the upcoming Amy Winehouse biopic Back To Black. With the film’s UK release date of April 12 fast approaching, it might be that there will be an announcement in connection with the film’s score coming tomorrow.

There is also a television adaptation of Cave’s 2009 novel The Death Of Bunny Monro in the works, with former Doctor Who star Matt Smith recently having been confirmed to take the title role.

Cave also shared his cover of Édith Piaf’s ‘La Vie En Rose’ last week, as part of Jack Antonoff’s soundtrack to the AppleTV+ historical drama The New Look. As this appears to be Cave’s only involvement on that project, though, it seems unlikely to be relevant to the countdown.

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