This band’s music is a dichotomy of aggressive rap and rock juxtaposed against a lyrical content that is somewhat dark and intense. Because of this contrast, I wanted a cover image that was at first calming to the viewer but upon closer examination a bit more unsettling and strange.

I had worked with the photographer, Dennis Keeley, on several other packages of mine and knew he would be right for what I was going for visually. Although he presented several images to me, I was instantly drawn to this image, in black and white, of a house without any windows.

I comped the image up and felt it was the cover as soon as I finished it. I hoped the band would react the same way and luckily, they did. In fact, in a very bizarre coincidence, one band member ended up recognizing the house as one that he had lived directly across the street from for years. Evidently the man who lived there was part of a police protection program and had cemented up all of the windows of the house years ago. No one ever saw him.

Once the band members and I were in agreement on the cover, I knew that the rest of the package had to be completely black and white. I then asked Dennis to find abandoned interiors of houses for the inside of the booklet. I wanted the inside of the booklet to look like what it might be like inside the house in its extreme decay—dark and ominous, yet enveloped in a strange calmness. I wanted the viewer to make sense of the dichotomy in their own way.

I also wanted the images to really stand out on their own, convincing the band to not go with standard lyrics but instead just having words and sentence fragments alone on the pages. All photos were separated as 4/c black and white to give them extra definition.

I love this package for its simplicity. As you go through the booklet, you feel like you’ve entered into someone else’s world and it’s unsettling. Although the images are stark and beautiful, there is a strong undercurrent of strangeness that cannot be ignored.