Nick Cave on new Bad Seeds:“It’s very beautiful”

With his dirty rock side project Grinderman winding up at Meredith last year Nick Cave has turned his attention to The Bad Seeds, revealing details of an impending new album in an interview with BBC Radio 6 this week.

Speaking to DJ Nemone, Cave said the follow-up to 2008’s Dig, Lazarus, Dig!!! has been recorded in Los Angeles, and should be out sometime in February 2013. He described the album as sounding unlike anything The Bad Seeds have done before. “It’s really good,” he told Radio 6. “It’s really very, very beautiful. It’s not a ballad record. It’s not like classic Bad Seed ballads. But it’s very, very beautiful and it’s far away from Grinderman and that kind of thing.”

Cave was being interviewed alongside director John Hillcoat about their new prohibition-era movie Lawless, which Cave wrote the screenplay for as well as the soundtrack alongside frequent collaborator Warren Ellis (The Dirty Three). The soundtrack contains a blend of bluegrass classics and original songs recorded with guests including Emmylou Harris and Mark Lanegan, as well as bluegrass legend Ralph Stanley, who sings a cover of ‘White Light/White Heat’ by The Velvet Underground.

Cave and Hillcoat previously worked together on The Proposition, as well as videos for songs including ‘Heathen Child’ by Grinderman. “I’ve got the legs,” Cave said of the video, in which the band wear Roman garb. “It was a homage to Russell [Crowe], who doesn’t have the legs.”