3 of My Favorite Album Covers

I’m going to try to keep this first section short here because these things usually have a way of getting out of hand, but I’m all caught up for the most part on albums I wanted to talk about and I have some time to do a different kind of post.

It’s not just because I have some spare time though, I’ve actually wanted to talk at least a little bit about the most pervasive visual element of modern music, pertaining to metal specifically.

The way most people experience music in this day and age, the first experience of a musician’s art is often with the visual aspect of it first and then the auditory focus of it second. Though the streaming/digital revolution has taken a lot of the drama of that interaction away, so many musical acts bank hard on their aesthetic and attention-grabbing imagery, from the rapper 6ix 9ine’s dumbass rainbow hair and grills to black metal’s historic use of corpse paint.

Any music listener these days, especially metalheads, can probably point to a number of bands who memorably caught their eye first and then their ear, with a wild album cover and a similarly wild album.

It’s definitely arguable that Cannibal Corpse would not be where they are today without the intentionally extremely grotesque album covers they employ and sonically emulate. We all probably remember the first time seeing the covers of albums like Butchered at Birth, Bloodthirst, or Tomb of the Mutilated (or others like them) and being lured into the music by the morbid curiosity of what kind of music could possibly be represented by such imagery.

Indeed, I think metal owes a lot of its success to the visual art that supplements it and serves as the bait that lures curious listeners in; metal, I think, has some of the most consistently interesting and diverse album artwork of any genre. 

Unlike pop album covers, which are often just a cropped picture from a glamour shoot with the title overlaid, old-ass jazz records featuring a still of the band performing, or hip hop covers that often feature their collective or solo artist visually matching whatever they’re conveying in the lyrics, metal (aside from hair metal) has generally avoided putting the band front-and-center on the fronts of albums, with the space on the front of the album generally reserved for some kind of visual art that captures, or inspired, the sound of the album.

That’s why I’ve wanted to get into this for a while; the visual aspect of the whole of the art of metal music, I think, goes less talked-about than it deserves, not to label the visual art of metal a gimmick and take away from the sound at all. It’s just a part of metal culture as integral as distorted guitars and blast beats are, and every genre and subgenre has just as notable visual artistic tendencies as musical tendencies. Brutal death metal and grindcore are notable for the gory imagery they associate with their music, and a prevalent stoner metal or doom metal sound can usually be deduced before listening to albums of the style by the giveaway of the 70’s style band logos and psychedelic imagery usually gracing the front covers. Deafheaven’s Sunbather was able to get so much attention and controversy simply by breaking black metal’s visual mold of greyscale corpse paint and illegible band logos with a bright pink album cover with modern (and now iconic) font spelling the title. 

I said I was going to keep this intro part short, what is wrong with me?

Okay, here are 3 album covers I just want to point out as some of my favorites. I don’t have a big comprehensive list of them from best to worst; these aren’t necessarily even my top 3, just 3 I happened to think of for this post, and there will be more to come.

Sepultura - Arise

Illustrated by Michael Whelan, the cover for Arise is a fascinating one to look at piece by piece. As a whole, its wild conglomeration of realistic images into a definitely nightmarish and abstract enigma is confusing. From the abysmal background to the convoluted monolith at the focus of the artwork, it stares back at you just as much as you stare at it trying to digest it. I was able to find a very high resolution image of it a while ago and only in that picture could I make out the tiny little man in the middle of the Stonehenge-esque platform gawking at the exposed eyeballs and the tortured souls evaporating from the glowing and disarticulated brain held up by lobster claws. It’s a mess, it’s awe-inspiring to see in great detail, and it could have any or absolutely no “deeper meaning”, but what’s certain about it is that it’s metal as fuck.

The Black Dahlia Murder - Everblack

While The Black Dahlia Murder isn’t my favorite band to go to for melodic death metal, they are one of my favorites to go to for their curation of intriguing, overtly metal cover art and the looming monstrosity created by Nick Keller on the front of Everblack is one of my favorites (the cover of Abysmal being another). But I went with this one for its foggy allusion to and resemblance of some kind gargantuan Lovecraftian beast from hell. The fog that hides what could be the bulk of this cover’s strange monster gives the piece a more eerie quality. I also love the glowing pillar’s resemblance to the film depiction of Minas Morgul (a city of Gondor built stupidly close to Mordor that inevitably became not a part of Gondor anymore). It’s not clear exactly what this multi-limbed thing does, but judging by the massive graveyard at its feet, it’s not good. It feels like it’s straight out of one of those disaster horror movies where all anyone can do is run helplessly away from the hellish monster eating or absorbing everyone around them closing in on them.

Slayer - South of Heaven

A dual effort between Larry Carroll and Howard Schwartzberg, South of Heavenboasts one of many of Slayer’s iconic album covers, and it’s probably my favorite cover from them. Peppered thoroughly over its whole surface with sacrilegious symbols and images, the setting and the little details are what set this one above the rest of Slayer’s similarly edgy covers. Apart from being attributed to the Slayer album with probably the most badass title, the more intricate and intact depiction of hell with devilish churches as a home for morbid demons is a unique take and one that invokes a lot of picturing being there, imagining what’s in those buildings, if it’s worse than what’s outside. It captures Slayer perfectly and it has deservedly gone down as one of metal’s most historic images.

Okay, that is enough for now, I have a list of a few others I want to appreciate, but, as with most things I do on this blog, a quick little post became not so little.