In 1989 a seventeen year old from Ravenshead, a village north of Nottingham, talked a local band called Lawnmower Deth into letting him paint their record sleeve. R.K.T. Records put it out. He did a second one for a band called Metal Duck. Inside three years the same hand had painted the front of four of the most consequential records the genre would ever produce, and he had still never been in a band.
That is the pattern, and it holds for almost everybody in this piece. death metal artwork was contract work, drawn up in rooms where nobody was listening to the records. Comics men, a trained architect, a fresco restorer, a film director who had not made his first film yet. The genre outsourced its own face and got a better one than it could have drawn itself.
Dan Seagrave, who paints buildings
Seagrave has more than a hundred covers behind him now, and the striking thing about the great ones is that almost none of them show a body. He paints structures. Masonry that has been growing for centuries and has started to breathe, subterranean chambers that continue past the edge of the frame, scale that puts the viewer somewhere below the floor. Where Repka gives you a monster at eye level, Seagrave gives you a room you are already inside.
His method explains the effect. He does not want to hear the record. He asks for the title and a general direction and nothing much beyond that, works from what forms in his head, and has been open about how uncomfortable he is being handed somebody else's idea to render. He now works out of Canada, which has not changed the paintings at all.
I prefer limited, but good and concise information, which then allows images to appear in the mind.
Dan Seagrave, interviewed by No Echo
The airbrush men
The American side of the tradition came out of poster illustration rather than fine art, and it looks it. Ed Repka, born in 1960, gave Death its first three faces and built the skull mascot that has fronted Megadeth for four decades, and his covers carry the flat saturated colour and hard theatrical lighting of a cinema foyer in 1983. Nothing on a Repka sleeve is ambiguous. That is the point of it.
The man who took that line forward is Wes Benscoter, a self taught painter working in acrylics out of Pennsylvania, who made his name in the middle of the nineties on covers for Slayer and for Relapse and has since painted for AC/DC, Black Sabbath, Kreator, Autopsy and Cattle Decapitation. Thirty years of it. Where Repka lights his monsters like a poster, Benscoter drowns his in colour until the whole canvas looks infected, and he is the reason a great many nineties and two thousands sleeves have that wet, feverish look.
The comics artists, who were never metal people at all
Two of the most extreme sleeves in the genre were painted by men whose working lives were spent somewhere else entirely. Kev Walker, a British illustrator based in Leeds, started in 1987 on 2000 AD and worked through Judge Dredd, Rogue Trooper and ABC Warriors before painting Autopsy's Severed Survival and Mental Funeral for Peaceville. From 1996 he was painting Magic: The Gathering cards, and after that Marvel books. The cadaverous surgery on those two Peaceville records was a side job for a man who spent the rest of the decade drawing space marines.
Vince Locke went further and stayed longer. Born in Michigan in 1966, he began drawing an underground zombie comic called Deadworld in 1986 and has painted every Cannibal Corpse sleeve in watercolour since Eaten Back to Life in 1990. In between he drew A History of Violence with the writer John Wagner, published by Paradox Press in 1997 and filmed by David Cronenberg in 2005. The band and the painter have never met.
The cadaverous surgery on those two Peaceville records was a side job for a man who spent the rest of the decade drawing space marines.
Berlin and Krakow
Europe built its own school and it was drier, colder and more literate than the American one. Andreas Marschall started as a record cover artist in Berlin in the early nineteen eighties and built more than a hundred airbrush artworks for Kreator, King Diamond, Obituary, Sodom, Blind Guardian and Immolation, whose Dawn of Possession he fronted with the inverted religious imagery that half the genre has been copying since. Then he changed trades. He founded a production company in 1991 and moved into music videos, and his first feature, Tears of Kali, came out in 2004 and took the Melies d'Argent at the European Fantastic Film Festivals Federation. Masks followed in 2011, and he directed the Alraune segment of the horror anthology German Angst alongside Jorg Buttgereit and Michal Kosakowski.
Zbigniew M. Bielak was born in Krakow in 1980 and trained as an architect, which is the single most useful fact about his work. His covers are drawn like technical plates: elevations, sections, encyclopaedic detail, everything measured. His first record sleeve was Watain's Lawless Darkness, he has done every Ghost studio album except the debut, he has worked for Mayhem and Paradise Lost, and in 2018 he gave Deicide the front of Overtures of Blasphemy. Nobody else in the field draws heresy with a set square.
The hand the underground actually hired
All of the above worked for labels with money. Underneath them sat the man the demo bands could afford, and his output dwarfs everybody else's.
Mark Riddick started in 1991, as a teenager, drawing logos, demo tape covers, seven inch sleeves and filler art for cut and paste fanzines, and he has never left that layer of the scene even after hundreds of bands passed through his desk: Dying Fetus, Devourment, Misery Index, Hypocrisy, Deceased, Nunslaughter, The Black Dahlia Murder. His rule is absolute black and white pen and ink, worms and cobwebs and rot drawn one filament at a time until there is no white left on the page, ink laid down the way damp spreads across a cellar floor. Four books came out of it, including a compendium running to roughly six hundred pages of work from the early nineties onward.
The current century's best painter came in from a stranger direction still. Paolo Girardi is Italian, self taught, with a background in historic fresco restoration and seventeenth century European painting, and he works in oils. More than a hundred sleeves so far, for Power Trip, Bell Witch, Artificial Brain, Hooded Menace and a long list of others, all of them looking like an altarpiece that has been left out in the weather.
| Artist | Came from | Death metal work | Also did |
|---|---|---|---|
| Dan Seagrave | A village school outside Nottingham, age 17 | Morbid Angel, Entombed, Suffocation, Dismember, Gorguts | Over 100 covers, now working from Canada |
| Ed Repka | American poster and comic illustration | Death, Possessed, Massacre | Megadeth's skull mascot |
| Wes Benscoter | Self taught, acrylics, Pennsylvania | Autopsy, Cattle Decapitation, Kreator | Slayer, AC/DC, Black Sabbath, horror film art |
| Kev Walker | 2000 AD, from 1987 | Autopsy on Peaceville | Magic: The Gathering from 1996, Marvel |
| Vince Locke | Underground comics, Michigan | Every Cannibal Corpse sleeve since 1990 | A History of Violence, filmed in 2005 |
| Andreas Marschall | Berlin, early 1980s | Immolation, Obituary, Sodom, Kreator | Three films as director or co-director |
| Zbigniew M. Bielak | Architecture, Krakow, born 1980 | Deicide, Mayhem | Watain, Ghost, Paradise Lost |
| Mark Riddick | Fanzines and demo covers, from 1991 | Hundreds of underground bands | Four books, including a 600 page compendium |
| Paolo Girardi | Fresco restoration, Italy | Over 100 sleeves in oils | Power Trip, Bell Witch, Hooded Menace |
What they have in common
Not a style. There is no shared style here at all: an architect's elevation and a watercolour and a stippled fanzine page have nothing to do with one another technically. What they share is a working relationship. The artist gets a title, a theme and a deadline, and then he is left alone with it, and the band takes what comes back. Bands that art directed their own sleeves generally got weaker sleeves.
The other thing they share is that almost none of them made their living from this. Walker paints for card games, Locke draws comics, Marschall makes films, Bielak is an architect. Metal is where their strangest work goes because metal is the only client that never asks them to tone it down. That freedom is also why a handful of these covers were pulled off shelves, seized at borders or reprinted blank, which is a separate and much noisier story told in the Banned and Censored Death Metal Covers.
Look at any pile of these records and you can name the hand before you read the spine. That is not something many genres can say about their own packaging, and it happened because the music was too disreputable to attract a design department and had to go looking for artists instead. If you want the rest of it, everything death metal, in order, the paintings are only the front of it. But they were the first thing anybody saw, and for a lot of us they were the reason we picked the record up.
