One illustrator is responsible for a substantial fraction of what this genre looks like, and he was working fast, cheap, and out of a recording budget that had usually already run out.
Ed Repka's airbrushed, high colour, mascot driven style is what most people picture when they picture a thrash sleeve, and the story of how that happened is a story about printing, record racks and money rather than about art direction.
What a sleeve had to do
Three jobs, in order of urgency.
Stop somebody at four feet. A twelve inch sleeve was seen at an angle among two hundred others by a person who had never heard the band, which pushes towards high contrast, a strong central image and a legible logo.
Describe the record. In 1986 there was no way to hear an album before buying it unless a friend had it, so the sleeve was doing the job a streaming preview does now.
And cost almost nothing. Which is why almost all of it is illustration rather than photography, and why airbrush in particular dominates: it was fast.
Repka
He created Vic Rattlehead, which is the best mascot in the genre because it is an argument rather than a monster: a skull with its eyes clamped, its ears plugged and its mouth wired shut. See no evil, hear no evil, speak no evil, rendered as a corpse, for a band whose subject is complicity.
He then did Death, Possessed, Atheist, Toxik, Hirax and dozens more, which is how a single visual grammar came to cover thrash and early death metal at the same time. If two records from opposite ends of the extreme spectrum in 1988 look like they belong together, that is usually why.
The other names
Larry Carroll did the four best Slayer covers and came from outside the genre entirely; his work is collage rather than illustration and is the only thrash artwork that would survive being hung on a wall.
Andreas Marschall gave the German scene its identity, in a considerably more precise and less cartoonish register than Repka's. Joachim Luetke did Destruction's Release from Agony and works in sculpture and photography rather than paint. And Away, Voivod's drummer, built a complete private universe and never worked for anybody else.
| Artist | Style | Key sleeves |
|---|---|---|
| Ed Repka | Airbrush, high colour, mascots | Megadeth, Death, Possessed, Atheist |
| Larry Carroll | Collage, painterly, dense | Four Slayer albums |
| Andreas Marschall | Precise, military, painted | Sodom, Kreator, Blind Guardian |
| Joachim Luetke | Sculptural, clinical | Destruction, later extreme metal |
| Away | Drawn, science fiction, private | Every Voivod sleeve |
Why it collapsed and came back
The standard fell apart almost completely during the 1990s. Sleeves went abstract, grey and photographic to match music that was chasing a different market, and a great many records from that period are visually indistinguishable from each other.
The revival brought the artwork back before it brought the music back, which is telling. A generation who had found these records second hand liked the sleeves first, and by the mid 2000s bands were commissioning Ed Repka directly. A modern record with a Repka cover is making a stated argument about what kind of album it is, before anybody has heard a note.
What the artwork was actually worth
More than the records, in several cases, which is a joke at the expense of everybody who has since paid an agency for the same thing.
These sleeves were commissioned for a few hundred dollars, painted in days, and have now been reproduced on shirts, patches and tattoos for four decades. Several bands who sold almost nothing at the time still sell merchandise on the strength of one image, and for a fair number of obscure groups the sleeve is the only part that survives at all.
The recurring figures that came out of this work have a piece of their own, and the vocal traditions that sat behind the images are in Thrash Vocals. The full account of the period is in The Golden Years.
Why airbrush
Because it was fast, it reproduced well on cheap card, and it held its colour at the size a record sleeve is actually seen.
An airbrushed image has smooth gradients and hard edges, which survives being printed on the sort of stock an independent label could afford in 1986. A pencil drawing or a photograph loses detail in that process; an airbrush painting does not. The style everybody now associates with metal artwork is substantially a solution to a printing problem.
It also worked at every size the image had to appear at, which mattered more than it sounds. The same painting had to function as a twelve inch sleeve, a cassette inlay a fifth of that size, a quarter page advert in a fanzine and a shirt, and very few illustration styles survive that range.
The photographs that are not there
Almost no thrash album of the 1980s put a photograph of the band on the front, and the absence is deliberate rather than accidental.
A band photograph does not read from four feet away in a rack. It also dates immediately, ties the record to a particular line up, and tells a browsing teenager nothing about what the music sounds like. An illustration does all three jobs better.
The exceptions prove it. The records that did use photographs in this period are mostly from bands with a major label art department, and a fair number of them look considerably more dated now than the airbrushed skulls they were supposed to improve on.
What the sleeves were actually about
Less horror than the reputation suggests, once you look at them properly.
Vic Rattlehead is about complicity. The Slayer covers are dense allegorical collages closer to religious painting than to a horror poster. Sodom's mascot is a soldier in a gas mask on records about chemical warfare. Voivod's artwork is science fiction with a coherent invented world behind it.
The skulls and demons are there and they are frequently doing a job. A sleeve that reads as gore at four feet turns out on inspection to be a political cartoon, which is the same trick the lyrics were pulling at the same time and for the same reason.
Sources and notes
Attributions follow the credits on original pressings, which for artwork are frequently incomplete. Years refer to original pressings.
