The masters of grindcore are set to hit the charts early next calendar year with their 15th studio album and this time, they’re going for a thematic project: lyrically, musically and visually.
The prolific princes of grindcore will release their 15th studio album on January 27th, 2015 and the alarming artwork above will grace the cover of each CD. The Danish designer Frode Sylthe, who has worked with the band before on their album called”Utilitarian”, and has worked with other artists such as The Haunted and Burst, has outdone himself this time.
The bassist from Napalm Death has shed some light on the highly stylized artwork and what it means to their album.
There are many meanings that you could grab from the new album artwork, I think. But one is the representation of how our natural and most basic needs for happiness and communication are being stripped away by materialism and pre-packaged garbage — crap that we don’t need, filtered to us through the media via the megacorporations with the goal to maintain the bloated bottom line of profit. It’s all just stuff that will be obsolete in six months time. And behind the scenes, of course, modern-day slavery is alive, well and obscured by this facade. It’s all an exercise in deceit to shower us with fake fulfilment, while the poor and underprivileged fall further by the wayside.
Well said, Shane.
Mark “Barney” Greenway, the group’s singer, elaborated on this concept.
I loved the idea of the supermarket-style packaging as soon as I saw it, as when you go into one of those places with nourishment in mind and you’re greeted with some miserable, artificially enhanced foodstuff contained in a bleak little receptacle of industrial plastics, it doesn’t exactly inspire you. To then fill that plastic tray with the dregs of meat production, well, that is the ‘easy meat’ in the title — representing the people who suffer for burgeoning consumption degraded and dumped in the most pitiful way.
The album seems as though it will be extremely relevant to the topics that are plaguing much of society, and that are treated submissively by many artists. We look forward to an honest critique of this supermaket society that we live in. Evidently, this subject matter calls for what Greenway calls a pretty “savage” delivery, which you will definitely hear on their single below, called “Cesspits”. Play it loud!
Here is the track list for the album.
01-Apex Predator – Easy Meat
02-Smash A Single Digit
03-Metaphorically Screw You
04-How The Years Condemn
05-Stubborn Stains
06-Timeless Flogging
07-Dear Slum Landlord…
08-Cesspits
09-Bloodless Coup
10-Beyond The Pale
11-Stunt Your Growth
12-Hierarchies
13-One-Eyed
14-Adversarial / Copulating Snakes