Behind The Artworks: Werewolves - Die For Us (2024)

SAM: We use a Tasmanian guy called Mitchell Nolte to do all our cover artwork, and we've used him from the beginning. The dude's a true artist. Everything he sends us has some eye-catching WTF factor to it. I thought they were all hand painted, took until the previous album til he revealed that he was creating them digitally. We're at a stage now where people know it's one of our albums just from the art style on it.

We give him the music, the lyrics, and a general theme and then let him get on with it. For anyone who hasn't seen the cover for DIE FOR US, it's a large pickaxe-armed mob forcing numerous people into an industrial mincer while playing in the goop. There's an obese three-headed lord with the trunk of an elephant looking upon all this, and a flayed body strung up behind that. All of this has meaning. I suspect the three heads are a depraved version of the three main deities, and the flayed body looks like a blood-eagle victim so I'm suspecting that indicates an older pagan religion behind the three modern ones. There's a ton of details and commentary amongst it all. People have gotten used to doing a death-metal "Where's Wally" with our last few album covers and really searching out the stuff hidden in there, they won't be disappointed with this one. I can't look at it too long, there's something about this one...the more I look at it, the more horrifying it gets.

I think Mitchell's pushing against the upper limits of violence in the artwork the same way we are with the music. I know the last couple of albums, we've thought neither the art nor music could get more horrible, but here we are! The funny thing is that he's actually running a theme through all our covers and we only discovered that last year. I won't give you the full theme, but he says this latest image is "like a 'crossed' version of some communist utopia where the people own the means of production, running the meat grinder and themselves - but new powers arise and now the 'Order of the Pick-Axe" form - reminding me of the cult group in the Stallone film COBRA".

We've definitely got the same taste in things.