Words by David C. Obenour
The horrors persist. There is no turning back from them. Our very existence is permeated. Mental illness, grief, isolation, relentless capitalism, a global pandemic laying all the more bare what many had not been given the luxury of denial. A search for meaning amidst it all. A search for respite. A search that leads to the creation of art and music.
Denver, Colorado’s Glacial Tomb have felt compelled to chronicle their pursuit through death and black metal. Ovalle, Chile’s Daniel Vega has channeled his explorations through illustration. Released through Prosthetic Records, Lightless Expanse combine the visions of both for a powerful statement on shouting back and finding meaning.
Off Shelf: Maybe moreso than any other genre, heavy metal music is deeply connected to the art of its covers. How do you explain this unique connection?
Ben Hutcherson: The way that most metalheads holistically engage with metal sets it apart from most other forms of music. We don’t just listen to metal. We don’t just go to metal concerts. We dedicate ourselves to it. We tattoo beloved band logos and album covers onto our flesh. We fill our closets with band merchandise. We talk about and think of ourselves in terms explicitly connected to it as fans and working professionals – e.g. metalhead, lifer, metal guitarist, lead vocalist. We are metal. That’s incredible! So, the first part of the answer can be summarized thusly: “Heavy metal is deeply connected to cover art because its fans are deeply connected to every facet of the metal music world.”
I think there’s also a crucial element of social class at play. Heavy metal has long been – and largely is still – the music of the working class. Money is hard to come by, perhaps now more than ever. It represents time spent at a job that we often don’t love creating products we don’t use ourselves all just to generate wealth for someone who ain’t us. So, when we spend our hard-earned cash at the merch table, the local record store, or in the NightShift webstore – shoutout to Karim & the gang! – it adds an additional variable in the proverbial calculus of heavy metal devotion. Put simply, the choice to spend precious resources of money and time supporting an artist whose music strongly resonates with you will generally strengthen and deepen the bond with said art and artist.
Daniel Vega: It is said that art and music are a means to release your inner demons or your inner concerns, generating a new dimension to let them get trapped and then analyze them and hopefully learn something from them – or at least share them with the world. And heavy metal in particular, because most of the time it deals with rather dark themes, so it complements very well with art, which operates in the same way. I think it is one of the genres where the art-music connection is very strong and evocative, and if the lyrics go along with it, so much the better.
OS: If you start to think about album covers that have resonated with you, what comes to mind? Can you think of why they resonate?
BH: Weakling – Dead as Dreams. The album is scary. The album art is scary. It thoroughly compliments the music and reinforces the vibe, for lack of a better term, without telling you the whole story. I first heard this album in college in 2003, and the moment John Gossard’s haunted shriek blasted from my speakers I felt like that ghostly figure.
Suffocation – Effigy of the Forgotten. I could put any number of Seagrave works here because of his mastery of Giger-esque geometry and mind-boggling body horror, but this one remains one of my all-time favorites because of how it enriches the songs. What is the figure on the cover doing with all of those bodies? Where did it come from? How can it be stopped? Who knows?! It gives you a setting that you can imagine to whatever degree you like and offers a context – i.e. fleshy post-apocalyptic hellscape – in which song lyrics that invoke familiar antichristian/antireligious themes take on a newfound richness because the setting itself is so unfamiliar.
Cannibal Corpse – Butchered at Birth. Any conversation about metal album art would be incomplete without discussing Vincent Locke’s iconic Cannibal Corpse covers. Look at the album cover. Say the title out loud. You know what you’re in for or… well, at the very least you know it’s going to be ungodly heavy. And that’s part of the job of album art. The dude has created so many instantly-recognizable visual companions for Cannibal’s uncompromising heaviness and I can’t hear a CC song without seeing the art in my mind’s eye.
DV: There are many examples! [laughs] The ones I could quote you quickly would be Pink Floyd’s Dark Side of the Moon, Mr. Bungle’s Disco Volante, the first album of Slipknot, Frances the Mute from The Mars Volta, Rammstein’s Live Aus Berlin, Autechre’s Draft 7.30, etc.
I’m a big fan of covers without text, that hit you directly visually, and that are somehow connected to the title and theme of the album without being too obvious. That have, in short, good storytelling: you see them and say “Oh, what’s this about? I’m intrigued!” and then you listen to them and boom! It all makes sense. When I saw the Slipknot’s one, for example, it was like “Who are these guys! what’s going on here!”, and you form a crazy mental image, which the album then complements or confirms. Something similar happened with the Rammstein cover, and with all the others as well.
OS: How do you think that personal connection informs what you’re wanting out of an album cover for Glacial Tomb?
BH: I spent a lot of time thinking about the feelings that I wanted to convey through the album’s art and layout. Lightless Expanse is, among other things, a meditation on the horror of sentience and the inevitability of suffering. I wanted the art to evoke a palpable sense of dread and an unavoidable recognition of our species’ cosmic insignificance.
I also spent a lot of time thinking about what I didn’t want to do with the album art. I didn’t want to tell the whole story, because I think that it’s vital to give the listener the space to navigate and negotiate the experience of the album itself. They find myriad elements that are compelling and build meaning around them. We do fans a disservice by holding their hand and smothering them with a “lore dump,” presenting everything about every part of every song as the singular unassailable “truth”. Instead, I wanted to give the listener more tools to engage with the world of Lightless Expanse to whatever extent feels right to them.
DV: That’s a careful decision, and it comes when the band knows exactly what to show in the cover, according to what they want to say; the artist in this case does the best to portray this idea/decision as accurately as possible. Though there’s other ways to accomplish the same goal: there are pics already around, and then a band call feels that the images go well with the idea of an album, and then they can use them, and other times all the decision making could reside completely in the artist. So it really depends on how the process of making the album cover is decided; you can go from the simple and obvious to the really encrypted and nebulous.
OS: How did you first become aware of Daniel Vega’s art? What about their style resonated with you?
BH: Dave [Small, bass] first showed me Daniel’s work back around 2019. It was love at first sight! The choice of colors was bold and unique. The exploration of existential horror felt profound. Daniel’s art felt like the perfect compliment to the songs we’d crafted for this album.
OS: Can you talk about the process of working together with them on the art for Lightless Expanse? Was it a commissioned piece or one they had already created?
BH: Daniel created the art specifically for this album after we spoke at length about the themes of the lyrics and the overall atmosphere I wanted to establish for the listener. I sent over a one-page summary of the narrative arc of the album as well as some guiding quotes from people like Thomas Ligotti, Philipp Mainländer, and Friedrich Nietzsche. I had a general sense of the elements I wanted to see – e.g. a massive celestial figure, a temple suspended in space, a portal of bodies and souls – but didn’t want to simply hire them to draw exactly what I saw in my mind’s eye. Where’s the fun in that?
I find a tremendous amount of joy in collaborating with artists whose talents lie in realms outside of, but connected to, the world of music. We interpret each others’ motives and resulting work – and, eventually, the interpretations themselves – until we arrive at a divine moment of collective creation wherein the art transcends what any of us might have initially expected. This album’s art was born of that very process and I cannot say enough good things about the experience of working with Daniel.
DV: The process went pretty smoothly and nice! Ben already had a good understanding of the idea he wanted to convey, and so that helped lots to achieve the final result without any problems. I very much liked the idea of that colossal, monolithic creature floating in space; I remember we had some previous iterations before settling with that eldritch figure sitting in a throne, but the initial idea was already great so we went for that one, and Ben gave enough room to depict that celestial being in my particular style, which was very appreciated. I too only have the best of words for this collaboration!
OS: For all of its fantastical inspiration, there are a number of more personal and contemporary themes on the new album. What about Vega’s work speaks to you about both aspects of the songs on this album?
BH: I wrote the lyrics with the hope of telling a fictive story that the listener can follow easily enough without abandoning the very real, very immediate elements of this world that inspired the story. Daniel’s art certainly emphasizes the more fantastical dimensions of this storytelling, placing familiar elements e.g. a temple, a humanoid body, a throne of sorts in places that are “wrong.” “Why is that temple on a floating rock in space?” “Why does the figure on the front have so many mouths?” “Is the chair… part of that person? Is that even a person?”
Juxtaposition of the mundane/familiar and the fantastical is, I reckon, one of the most effective ways to push a person out of their comfort zone when they engage with art. It disrupts their expectations, signifying that the interpretive framework they have equipped might not be the best way to holistically approach a new piece of art.
DV: I totally share Ben’s perspective, which also goes in line with what I had mentioned above, of how a cover can grab you, generate questions and mental scenarios that make you want to listen to the album!
OS: How do you think Vega’s art welcomes the listener into experiencing the music?
BH: First, I hope that the album art grabs people’s attention and piques their curiosity. “What the hell is that?!” is precisely the question I want newcomers to ask when they first see the art.
Second, I hope that the art creates a set of expectations in their mind as they prepare to hit play for the first time. Whether they are in their car or at the gym or at home in their meticulously-constructed listening environment, the folks listening to the record for the first time–hell, the folks listening to us for the first time–deserve to have an experience that reflects our intentionality and our respect for their time and energy. We created this album because we felt compelled to do so in the most holistic and profound way I can imagine–there simply wasn’t an option to not craft these songs, pour ourselves into them, and release them into the world for others to experience. Daniel’s art is the perfect compliment to those songs and I hope that folks find something profound and worthwhile in the experience of listening to the songs while holding the CD or vinyl in their hands.
DV: Of course, everyone can have their own interpretations about the art and its connection with the music and lyrics, so the “welcoming” can vary from one person to another. That said, my art is very much influenced by music too, so at the very least I think it is genuine and honest, and so welcomes the listener with honesty. I hope the listener can feel intrigued or interested enough with what’s happening in the cover, and that it does justice to the music and lyrics, so that the whole experience can be total and satisfactory.