Album Art of the Week: Neaera – ‘Omnicide: Creation Unleashed’

Cities and and urban skylines have a long history in metal and hard music artwork; so much so that there's too many to mention. In most cases, the art exemplifies the destructive nature of humanity by illustrating the destruction of humanities' creation in places where humanity is most concentrated. Buildings are destroyed and landmarks are broken but still recognizable as means of tracing the regression of human activity from technological production back to primitivism. It can be regarded as an ideological reboot.

On Neaera's newest offering, 'Omnicide: Creation Unleashed,' artist Terje Johnsen takes an almost opposite approach for the cover. The buildings are intact, but the excess of blood suggests that humanity has offed itself via specifically anthro-centric means.

"The band wanted me to illustrate something called 'omnicide' for this release," Johnsen revealed to Noisecreep. "'Omnicide' is human extinction as a result of human action. By doing that we used the biggest cliché in the history of metal music artwork: blood. And lots of it."

The inside panels feature the same theme in urban and natural scenes, and the distinct lack of corpses in each scene was a strong point in the artwork's concept. Johnsen explains why. "Although omnicide is caused by humans we didn't want any humans in the artwork. Therefore we made a twist to the nuclear war theme and replaced all the explosions with blood. Red/blood is a strong way to illustrate explosions. At the same time the blood represent the humans."