Nick Cave Hints Third Grinderman Album is in The Works

Nick Cave has revealed his plans to complete a trilogy of Grinderman records by returning to the project for a third album after a nine-year hiatus.

The Bad Seeds frontman revealed the news in his latest Red Hand Files post, stating that Grinderman’s first two albums are “part of a yet to be completed trilogy, you might be happy to know.”

In the post Cave discusses a moment he felt pride in himself, and his favorite guitarists, which lead him to recount when King Crimson guitarist Robert Fripp collaborated with Grinderman on an extended version of the song Heathen Child from their sophomore album Grinderman 2.

The extended version of the track, Super Heathen Child, says Cave, and “Grinderman at their very best” and “recording with Robert Fripp remains one of the seismic events of my life.”

“I felt as though Grinderman was laying claim to their roots,” he adds. “Super Heathen Child continues to have an extraordinary hold over me, and contains within it a deep emotional pull because it is attached directly to my adolescence.”

“Listening to it, I have that strange dizzying feeling a dream has when it suddenly becomes a reality; all that deep concentrated listening I did when I was a teenager manifesting itself over 40 years later in a Fripp solo that just blows the mind.”

The post began, by mentioning that Cave had been watching a film starring Nicholas Cage, which featured King Crimson during the film’s opening credits:

“Recently, I watched the movie Mandy with my sons – a terrifying but beautiful film. The song ‘Starless’ by King Crimson was used to great effect during the opening credits. My sons agreed that this was an amazing song, which made me happy because when I was a teenager I was a huge King Crimson fan. King Crimson was able to combine extraordinary moments of purity and fragility with super heavy rock ‘n’ roll, and maybe they imprinted somewhere in my mind the template for some of the more schizophrenic Bad Seeds songs. King Crimson were masters of the sudden violent eruption. Bill Bruford, their drummer was simply off the planet and Robert Fripp was my favourite guitarist at the time, along with, of course, David Gilmour.”

Grinderman were a group comprised of Nick Cave, Warren Ellis, Martyn P Casey and Jim Sclavunos, formed in 2005. The band released two albums: Grinderman in 2007 and Grinderman 2 in 2010.

Despite disbanding in 2011, a short reunion took place at Coachella in 2013. Of the reunion, Cave took to Twitter to shoot down any critiques of the band reuniting:

The question is, will we see the return of Cave’s handlebar mustache?

Read Cave’s latest post on The Red Hand Files.