UnCovered: Jake Dreyer of Witherfall on the Colour Purple and AI-Generated Album Artwork

Los Angeles-based dark melodic metal outfit Witherfall recently released their highly anticipated new album, Sounds Of The Forgotten. Initial pre-order sales of the album sold out.

Taking influence from ’90s bands like Type O Negative and Alice In Chains, the title track of the album, along with the colour purple, also inspired the theme of the record’s cover.

In the latest round of UnCovered, V13 spoke to Jake Dreyer, lead guitarist and songwriter with the progressive metal band, about the album design, some of his favourite album artwork pieces and why he thinks AI is ruining metal.

Jake Dreyer: “Sounds of the Forgotten out now via Deathwave Records. The artist we commissioned is Blake Armstrong.”

What are some of your favourite covers of all time?

“Guns ‘n’ Roses Appetite for Destruction, King Diamond Them and Voodoo, Iron Maiden Somewhere in Time.”

Who are some of your favourite visual artists?

“Salvador Dali, Nissan Engel, Todd White.”

Witherfall ‘Sounds of the Forgotten’ Album Artwork

What style of art would you be most interested in seeing as a variation of your album artwork?

“A Dali version would be trippy.”

Have you ever purchased an album solely because of its album artwork? If yes, did the music live up to the artwork?

“Yes, I purchased The Elder by Kiss when I was a kid. It was an interesting listening experience.”

With the increasing popularity of digital music, most fans view artwork as just pixels on a screen. Why did you feel the artwork was important?

“I think the visual aspect of the record is extremely important. The artwork sets the stage before any music is heard and can be a prelude of what some of the emotions might be. I find that it is similar when it comes to movie covers as well. If I see cheap art I am going to think the product is cheap. I have been seeing more of that with people just releasing digital.”

What do you think are some of the cover artworks that have translated best/worst onto t-shirts and other merch?

“I think some pretty obvious larger bands have done it the best. Iron Maiden, Metallica, but the one that always looks cool no matter what is Appetite for Destruction by Guns ‘N’ Roses… that one just always looks great.”

What’s your favourite thing about this album cover?

“I think that Blake Armstrong visually captured the mood the album conveys. We always use a few elements of nature and, on this one, we wanted “sounds” to refer to as a body of water. The colour purple, which is another aspect we requested, looks great behind his scene.”

How do you think the record business and art industry are navigating the handling of album artwork?

“The industry as a whole is very limited in its vision. Honestly, the use of crappy CGI and AI to make album covers needs to stop. It’s embarrassing and is one of the reasons metal is not the popular genre it used to be.”

Sounds of the Forgotten is available now, and you can pick up various bundles from the Official Witherfall Website.