Celebrating the Visuals of Metal of 2024 with Metalligator

Please swipe or click right on each image to get the full breakdown

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Yoann Lossel

for Alcest – Les Chants De L’Aurore
yoannlossel.com/artwork | instagram.com/yoann.lossel

Yoann Lossel‘s cover art for Alcest‘s Les Chants De L’Aurore is utterly fascinating to me and I could stare at it for hours. It feels like a good lead into this feature as it’s not only a beautiful piece, it’s also a great way to explore creative expression in relation to another medium by way of comparison. See, this piece is a re-interpretation of an old painting, namely “The Spirit of the Plains“, 1914, by Sydney Long — one of Neige‘s favorite paintings. Some might call foul on me placing it on a list among original works, but this reinterpretation changes the image significantly and adds its own spin on the subject. The key feature here is an exaggeration of the original’s features until the image changes into something that represents Alcest‘s warm and emotional post black metal. The sun, barely visible in Long‘s original, bleeds its color all over the image and puts Alcest‘s mark on the expression it gives off. The birds in “The Spirit of the Plains” resemble a wave following along the flute player, while in the Les Chants De L’Aurore cover art they more actively flock around the figure. This particular detail is part of what has me so captivated — the birds create a spiral that draws you into the flute player and into the glare of the sun, inviting you into its warmth. The minimalism of the original is still intact, but with a change in composition and choice of colors to highlight, Yoann Lossel brings his own flair to the image and makes it memorable all over again.

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Caroline Harrison

for Pyrrhon – Exhaust
carolinedraws.com | instagram.com/carolinedraws | album review

Pyrrhon‘s album releases tend to feel like events. Not only do they deliver pleasantly grotesque sounds to my speakers but also mesmerizing, matching artwork from their long time collaborator Caroline Harrison. Knowing this, I still was not ready for how excellent Exhaust would be, and that starts with its album cover. Living in an urban environment and spotting a dead bird on the street is something that many would probably consider mundane, so perhaps it takes a morbid artistic perspective to find such a thing fascinating (I’m definitely guilty of this!). But Harrison has taken her time to render such an event in excruciating detail, making it hyper-realistic at the same time clearly standing out as a painting. This is what art is all about, depicting something with the feelings of the artist(s) bleeding through the image. An everyday death in the street, drenched in the beautiful colors of spilled oil — how better to represent what Pyrrhon sounds like? A particular quirk of Harrison‘s that I like is that she never tries to hide the linework she uses in paintings. If you look closely at Exhaust‘s cover you will find crosshatching in the asphalt and puddles, as well as painted (inked?) lines rendering the pigeon’s coat of feathers intricately. At first I couldn’t believe parts of this image weren’t digital. But with watercolor, ink, and gouache, Harrison has reached a whole new level of expression that will draw your eyes instantly all while challenging your gaze.

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Luciana Nedelea

for Veilburner – The Duality of Decapitation and Wisdom
nedelealuciana753.wixsite.com | instagram.com/madartistlydia | album review

Matching the esoteric expression of Veilburner to a T (or 7),¹ Luciana Nedelea‘s cover art for The Duality of Decapitation and Wisdom reminds me of something a lot of kids used to do when younger: we’d grab some paper and try to fill it with as many odd characters as possible, cramming in detail just because the white of the paper dared you to abuse it. What a bunch of kids often cannot do, however, is make an image that is entirely cohesive at the same time. This is something that Nedelea‘s artwork does with ease by a very simple trick. Despite how much is happening in this image, it remains entirely calm because of a well picked compositional choice of splitting the image into two vertical columns, aided by a good grasp of how to use contrasts. There is the sorcerer….man-dragon and then the summoned spirit. The white-teal-red smoke that rises from the summoning separates the image into these columns, and the mostly straight line of the horizon in the background makes it all very easy to read. Knowing how to place a band logo and album title isn’t as simple as slapping them on there, and in this case another horizontal line is created between the logo and the sorcerer-serpent. Such a simple detail as having the band logo participate in the composition like this low-key blows me away. Nedelea uses the same care in placing the album title with the figures at the bottom. All of it creates a balance that makes this image technically impressive apart from how such a colorful piece manages to match a metal album’s feeling. Color me impressed.

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Andrew Durgin-Barnes

for Lifesick – Loved by None, Hated by All
instagram.com/a.e.d.barnes

Perhaps as a natural consequence of my studies in comics, I’m always on the lookout for a good sense of movement when looking at artwork. In paintings, you can’t rely on linework as in comics, meaning that you need a good grasp of how shapes imply movement. One of the most impressive cases of this that I came across in 2024 is Andrew Durgin-Barnes‘ cover art for Lifesick‘s Loved by None, Hated by All. Nevermind that the light bleeding through and reflecting off the obsidian green of the water’s surface is impressive enough, the composition uses a strong diagonal to really make you feel the intensity of the situation. While the body of water is clearly restless with waves you can see in the background, the horizon is rendered completely flat and “calm” to be an intentional foil for the diagonal of the raft and big wave about to swallow it. Even the clouds in the background follow this horizontal pattern, so it clearly isn’t done by mistake. Straight and strong diagonals can be hard to use because of how much force they bring with them, but here Barnes uses the crest of the wave, the foam, and the ghostly figures to help us recover from the pull before we tip over. Really feeling the danger of the wave thus, it’s hard to miss the impression of despair that the album title suggest.

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Paolo Girardi

for The Black Dahlia Murder – Servitude
instagram.com/paologirardipainter | album review

No one can accuse Paolo Girardi of slacking off with his huge output of paintings and how ridiculously much detail the man manages to cram in there. But to me, Girardi is at his most interesting when he introduces elements of balance and deep attention to the use of color in his paintings. No stranger to hellish imagery, the painting that adorns Servitude stands out as particularly nightmarish to me. The subject of people in boats choosing to flee straight into a watery grave rather than get caught by demons chasing them is an image that conveys the brutality and hopelessness of The Black Dahlia Murder‘s music well. Something that stands out to me is that there are actually two circles in this image rather than only the one in the middle that is the main focal point. With the darkness of the water forming a curved space at the bottom of the image, another circle is completed with the demons above, balancing out the big logo and album title. It’s a harsh kind of calm, frozen in time, that gives me the same impression as Gustave Doré‘s wood-engravings of Dante‘s “Divine Comedy”. Tying it all together, I love the semi-monochromatic color scheme that flows between subdued blues, greens and a light beige looking like old paper. The waves are rendered only just so to be suggestively abstract, while the more certain death approaches from above.

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M.S. (Abomination Hammer)

for Invocation – The Archaic Sanctuary (Ritual Body Postures)
instagram.com/abomination.malleo

Is this scene underwater? It’s not quite clear but the color scheme, the floating figure in the upper part of the image and particles coming out of the horn the human figure is holding seems to imply as much. Either way, this is a beautifully rendered piece that crams in a lot of detail — so much so that it should be hard to look at. Why isn’t it? Two design decisions help out here. First, the image is split into three columns, roughly following the perspective of the room. With a brighter blue-green strengthening the central figure and the “spirit” in the middle telling us where to focus. Second, the strong diagonal from the light leaking in from the widows help us return there should we start to wander, as does the columns and snake in the murals lead us back to the middle on the lefthand side. There lies a striking beauty in this piece with its monochromatic approach and intentionally rougher paint. It oozes atmosphere with the strong direction and a looseness that is produced by skill and experience, at once rendering a ton of detail but still leaving enough to the imagination with implied shapes.

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Noah Cutter Meihoff

for Aseitas – Eden Trough
ncmeihoff.com | instagram.com/ncmeihoff | album review

I have been watching Noah Cutter Meihoff develop his technique during 2024, and his process is a sight to behold. Using acrylic to paint over a sketch in layers, he transfers the rough shapes of his images by using a black paper as a print that he presses against the sketch. Then he fills in all of the details with colored pencils. The black space left leaves enough room for imagination to fill in the gaps and complete the shapes. It’s a process that might sound simple but requires tons of work to render it all out. I could have picked any one of his covers for Imperial Triumphant, Herakleion, or Molten, but the sheer effort put behind his suite of images putting a face to all of the songs on Aseitas‘ third album Eden Trough deserves special mention. Only the cover art itself shows a tight control of color that pushes a great amount of detail back to showcase the grotesque tree of Aseitas‘ style evolving in horrific ways. Almost like a fun foil to Opeth‘s album cover for Heritage, the trope of the progressive growing tree is perverted, developing hidden from all but the most unfortunate beholders. Coming across like a combination of morbid tarot art, the tripped out spiritualism of Alex Grey‘s work for Tool and horror movie imagery, the grotesque style of Meihoff is likely one a lot of people will come to know in the coming years.

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Joost Vervoot

for Verwoed – The Mother
instagram.com/joost.vervoort_artwork

Do you need a subject in an album cover to make the viewer listen to the music? What makes up a subject anyway; that you clearly see something you identify with? Can you identify with simple lines and shapes? “Ceci n’est pas une pipe“, René Magritte‘s famous image of a pipe that calls attention to the fact that just because it looks like a pipe for smoking tobacco, you can’t use it as such since it’s in fact wholly composed of lines, shapes and color on paper (in this case represented digitally by ones, zeroes and pixels on a huge number of screens!) — a meta statement on the nature of images. Here, abstract art enters the conversation. Does its worth lie in reminding us of figures or in making us feel something? Whichever way you find it, Joost Vervoot‘s (also a member of Schammasch, credited as C.S.R) cover art for Verwoed‘s The Mother raises a fascinating unease in me. The shapes could imply a figure in a coat, that is burning, feeling intense emotion or just holding something in its hand and looking at it. The yellow-ish shapes coupled with uneasy red paint strokes suggest shape, direction and tension in a way that I just find compelling. As much as this is a list diving into the technical side of album art, this piece has me stumped as to how to explain it further. But maybe I just bring it up to marvel at how a simple set of lines on a canvas can make me feel.

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Jesse Draxler

for Dissimulator – Lower Form Resistance
jessedraxler.com | instagram.com/jessedraxler | album review

For as many calm horizontal lines and soft curves that makes up Jesse Draxler‘s photo manipulated cover art for Lower Form Resistance, the impression is actually one of a cold chaos. To take the soft forms of a human face and make it look alien is in actuality quite simple, you just need to grab, say, an eye and move it slightly outside of the usual proportions. But to create real unease takes skill and experimentation, and Draxler‘s piece for Dissimulator does just that. This image is a sort for betrayal of humanity through perversion of its shapes and it grabbed my attention the same instant that it graced my eye. The most obvious example of this is the way the eyes of the figure have been exchanged for mechanical shapes, hexagonal bolts and circles, that we just can’t see as anything else than eyes because our minds are primed to read faces. To add a further severe insult to injury, one of the eyes is pushed up into the figure’s temple, very near to the edge of the image where it should just not be, naturally nor compositionally. This simple detail just screams its wrongness across the rest of the image of tubes and modules infecting the human face. It’s a perfect fit to the mechanical and pleasantly robotic technical thrash metal Dissimulator peddle on Lower Form Resistance.

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Misha Mono

for Baron – Beneath the Blazing Abyss
instagram.com/mono_means_doom

There’s no shortage artists creating good visual representations of gore, violence, calamities, or morbidly divine figures in metal artwork. It boggles the mind how much talent there is invested in it, really. However, in this sea of depraved imagery you can easily get desensitized unless the artist spends enough time thinking of how to make an image “pop” off the page or screen. Misha Mono‘s cover art for Beneath the Blazing Abyss is such a case. On its face, this image is a typical metal cover, but how it’s presented is what makes it stand out to me. First, it’s beautifully rendered with strong shadows and great attention to the lighting radiating out from the colossal figure in the pit. It creates an atmosphere for sure, but the composition beneath is what completes the image. This image has a large sense of scale, you can see it in how the stairs is a bit awkwardly squeezed in the bottom to emphasize the perspective (though it does work). But the most striking detail lies in a simple compositional line you can draw between the massive burning figure and the human in the foreground. What is happening in this image? Is it a trade? A service done? Or a threat? Whichever it is, there is a tension in this exact spot, created by subject and composition that will make me remember this monstrosity.

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David Olmos

for Svdestada – Candela
behance.net/DAVIDOILLUSTRATION | album review

Photography is all about subject and framing. Candela‘s cover art evokes mystery with a few simple but effective means. The synergy between Teresa Yoldi‘s pose and David Olmos‘ framing of said pose along with lighting is what makes this image tick. This is a very vertical composition, where you’re led from the model’s face looking down on her hands, sliding down forcefully towards the brightly lit hand at the bottom. About to slide out of the image, the text declaring band and album title pulls you back at the last second. The relation between the two hands is what creates the mystery, making you wonder what the gesture means and what exists between the two defined points. With three distinct layers, there is depth to this photo that is created without adding too much detail. There is the vague background giving you very little sense of place, the smoke covered model that is sensually lit,² and the stark “punch” of the hands. The grainy texture above it all makes you focus further on the stronger points of light and merges the other details down to a flatter haze. Whatever Svdestada is all about, this image makes me want to find out.

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1. A 7 looks like a T, right? – Editor ↩︎
2. We call these drapey lady covers in the biz – Editor ↩︎