Nick Cave – Wild God

Nick Cave & The Bad Seeds – WILD GOD

Wild God is the eighteenth studio album by the Australian rock band Nick Cave and the Bad Seeds, released on 30 August 2024 on PIAS.

Nick Cave’s marketing team approached OneTenEleven in Dec ’23 with a view to recreating Thunderwing’s physical artwork in 3D.

Re-Creating the letter form “Wild God” in 3D space would open up a wide range of possibilities for animation and design.

Forming Wild God

When Nick discussed his inspirations for this record, both in terms of narrative and visual cues, it was always with an awareness of how powerful the name WILD GOD is. As we lived with the album, we felt it evoked a uniquely transcendent aura, like a gospel… dark, yet deeply hopeful.

So we treated it in a very monolithic way, designed with restraint, no decoration, nothing extra — we thought about it in terms of sculpture by creating a sacred object. And so it became a 3-dimensional form that truly exists.

The Wild God album cover, for all of its visual tidiness, is made of physical letters, placed by hand, and molded using heat to extrude and form white plastic.

– Thunderwing (Nic Taylor & J.B. Taylor)

Lighting Wild God

The next steps were to light and photograph the object that was created, and both were achieved beautifully by Ian Allen, who also shot Nick’s portrait for the album’s inner sleeve. Ian has a gift for lighting with scientific precision. During this process, he experimented with colored lights, sometimes shining multiple colors from multiple angles. This birthed the idea of the sculpture as a centerpiece upon which light, shadow, and color can be animated.

– Thunderwing (Nic Taylor & J.B. Taylor)

3D Replication

In January ’24 Antony Kitson of OneTenEleven, set about recreating Thunderwing’s physical artwork in 3D space. Using the final artwork and photos of the production process as a reference guide.

Cinema4D’s mesh builder tools were utilised to create the sculptured formation of the letters.

Once the mesh object was created, texture & lighting were added to the scene with Redshift renderer to closely reflect the studio setup used by Photographer, Ian Allen.