Jet Explain Flaming Truck Album Cover

Australia's Jet finally got the black smoke and fiery inferno it always wanted, even if it wasn't the result of a nuclear explosion.

The cover art of its forthcoming album, Shaka Rock, due August 25, features a graffiti-adorned white van set alight, and it's "100 percent real," confirms drummer/vocalist Chris Cester, not PhotoShopped. The rock band's last album, 2006s 'Shine On,' was simply a black cover with their faces in the top portion, not what they originally wanted.

"There's this book called 100 Suns [by Michael Light], which is a book of military photographs of nuclear explosions, test explosions in deserted islands and in the desert and stuff, and we were just gonna call it Shine On and have one of those big explosions on it and the record company was like, 'That's probably not a good idea. The Japanese might not be too fond of it,' but I thought that was crazy," says Chris.

"Once we signed with Elektra," he explains, "everyone at Elektra got fired and we had no friends there and slowly over time everyone at the record company became strangers to us and the original flight plan was kind of demolished. We found ourselves in the record business musical chairs, and when the music stops they all sit down and they've all got a new job. It's really weird. But they were like, 'It won't go down well in Japan.' They completely misunderstood."

No longer with Elektra (they are with EMI worldwide), Chris, his brother Nic Cester (lead vocals, guitar), Cam Muncey (guitar) and Mark Wilson (bass) went to upstate New York to do a photo shoot for Shaka Rock with a famed photographer friend of their new managers.

"He's a really great photographer," says Nic, "but all of a sudden we found ourselves going down the Shine On road, where we were gonna take another photo of our band and stick it on the front, so that wasn't really worth it.

"So we went back down to Manhattan and we were waiting to get into a restaurant for lunch and one of those trucks came by with all the graffiti on it, like a Chinese delivery truck or something, and Cam was like, 'Ah, f-ck, why don't we just get a f-ckin' truck and write our name on it and set it on fire and be done with it?' And we were like, 'Yeah, let's do that.' So we did it - this album, all the decisions were made like that."

"We bought a crappy truck off eBay," adds Chris, "and we took it out to L.A. and we had two graffiti crews compete for the design of it. They each did a side - and I think the other side might come out if we put some singles out or something - we picked our favorite side and we set it on fire." Tao Ruspoli did the photography, coordinated the graffiti and set it ablaze.

Now their pyromania is out of their system.