Nick Cave Announces New Bad Seeds Album

Grinderman winds its way across the world's stages this fall and winter in honor of its September-released album, 'Grinderman 2,' but frontman Nick Cave is already thinking about his next recording project. "There will be a new Bad Seeds record next year," Cave announces to Spinner about the plan for his longtime band's return.

However, fans shouldn't expect anything to happen in the near future. "I've got to write one," he adds, "I haven't written anything yet, but that's not how I go about things anyway. I have the starting date for the next record and that's when I go into the office and start it. I'm not doing that until I've finished the Grinderman tour, which is amazing. The band is something else," he says proudly.

Grinderman shares members with the Bad Seeds, so once Cave has written lyrics, the troupe will reconfigure with Seeds guitarist Mich Harvey "sometime next year." In the meantime, Cave is enjoying the task at hand. The 53-year-old London-based Goth rocker, whose writing regularly expands into movie and TV scripts, as well as books--he recently added a second novel, 'The Death of Bunny Munro'--says that the second Grinderman album has been as much of a joy to make as the first.

"After we finished the first one and saw the response to it and saw the rejuvenating effect it had on the Bad Seeds, it made sense to continue. It's like having a mistress: It has the ability to reinvigorate the Bad Seeds or destroy the Bad Seeds. I think it's put a spark of life back into the relationship."

Still, it wasn't like the Bad Seeds was slacking. The band's last album, 2008's 'Dig, Lazarus, Dig!!!!,' was a rock tour de force. But Cave says Grinderman scratched some proverbial seven-year-itch. "We've been doing it for a long time," he says of the early 1980s-formed Bad Seeds. "It's been very helpful to the band, because people who are in the Bad Seeds who aren't in Grinderman feel liberated as well: If they can make a fucking racket why can't we? It's changed the dynamic in a very positive way."