As has been the case with his last couple albums, Nick Cave’s powerful new collection Carnage arrived with some amount of mystery. He mentioned he and Warren Ellis were going into the studio, and soon after in another Red Hand Files post he said they’d made an album called Carnage, and soon after that the album was here. Since then, he’s started to offer some more details. In a recent Red Hand Files letter, he wrote about the friend who inspired “White Elephant,” Carnage‘s standout track. And in today’s Red Hand Files, Cave reflects on how the album was made — and some future plans surrounding it.

One fan wrote in asking about Ellis claiming that the songs for Carnage came together in two and a half days. In response Cave gives the most in-depth response we’ve gotten from him on the album so far. A lot of the writing he was doing at the time was inspired by the stillness of lockdown, as he adjusted to not traveling. He talks about how he and Ellis got together in the midst of lockdowns and not seeing one another last year, and they just played for a couple days. Ellis culled the best moments from the sessions and urged Cave to go back and listen to them, and he apparently immediately decided to call the album Carnage.

The pandemic derailed Cave’s plans to tour Ghosteen, and in the end we got his Idiot Prayer solo performance, which did feature some songs from it. But there’s a sense now that he’s got two monumental albums that haven’t been able to fully make their way out into the world, and so the rest of the letter deals with some of his plans with Carnage. Apparently they’re having their old collaborator, director Andrew Dominik, come to England to film Cave and Ellis performing Ghosteen and Carnage. Dominik is, of course, the man who made the poignant One More Time With Feeling, the film that accompanied Skeleton Tree. One would have to assume that only good things are going to come out of these three men working together again. You can read Cave’s post here.