Even though it isn’t much of a taste the rainbow effect, the new Anthrax album cover has been reveals for their album For All Kings, which will be released next year. The mastermind behind the new artwork is Anthrax’s Charlie Benante and Alex Ross.
The album cover art features a stained glass window with a pentagram in the middle. The glass itself is hexagon shaped and the pentagram has the A for Anthrax in the middle. The members of Anthrax represent five kings of a certain religion or branch of idea, hence the pentagram and pagan iconography in the layout. The album cover itself is supposed to be a tribute to the recent Paris attack that happened this past Friday. The church one could speculate is Notre Dame, where in the Middle Ages the town was centered around the church, but when Napoleon redesigned the city of Paris, all the streets point to the Arc of Triumph (L’Arc de Triumph). Anthrax’s Charlie Benante recorded a video that went behind the concept of the new album cover.
The album cover represents a world that shows the Heavens and Divine Lands as described by Huxley in his “Other World”. The subconscious notion of the transporting depcitions of religion and the seeds for implementing the ways into which one could describe the rainbow colored glass as an anlaogy of Robespierre’s gemstone analysis where the colored glass and the cultural norms of the time implemented the was in which religion shows the divine beauty of another world. It is this notion of other by Todorov that states that the symbols of the flying buttresses in Gothic churches and the Wiccian notion of the pentagram represent the purest forms of life that create a person to be fit for their certain position. The five band members represent the five pillars and five points in a pentagram that make up the spirit and the life force that many of us know today as man or woman. It is within the religious notion that all points can ascent to the hierarchy of the king and his position as the divine rule graced by God himself, that anoints the pictures depiction of the album’s tracklisting and the representation of those who are brought to rule by religion and those who rule within the objectification of war or political means.
Even though their drummer was unable to join them on the European tour, Benante has been able to complete other forms of the new disc release that would come out as of next year. In the video, the band released their new single “Evil Twin,” which was released just weeks prior to the Paris terrorist attacks, and yet the lyrics tie in very closely with the events that just happened. The new album is also a tie-in that Benante hints in the video stating that the previously released albums have a connection between all three.
The band’s recent tour will be wrapped up in December with the help of Slayer, and their new tour will include Lamb of God as part of their scheduled dates. For All Kings will be out in February of next year.
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