Behind The Artwork: MALACODA - Restless Dreams (2018)

The album cover was created by my girlfriend, Yeganeh Ghasemi, who is a graphic designer and web developer by trade. She’s actually the woman on the album cover!

Malacoda has always had elements of the paranormal/supernatural in all our artwork, nothing has ever been particularly subtle and we try to evoke not terror, but an unsettling feeling of something “not quite right”. All our artwork can also arguably be seen as “pretty”, and I find that those who have told me that they find it eerily comforting are those in a gothic subculture or horror niche- so we seem to know our audience!

We felt that the main character of our concept album wasn’t really the one who was going through the ghost town of Silent Hill and narrating his experiences through most of the lyrics, but was actually the spirit of his murdered wife who energy permeated as a musical element throughout the record. Her spirit had really become one with the ghost town in my perspective.

The idea was to take the very end of the album’s story - as the main character has driven into the lake with his wife’s corpse in the backseat of his car to kill himself so he can be with her forever.

Yeganeh did some makeup to make herself look “dead” and ghostly, and just started flinging her head around and rolling her eyes back as she took photos of herself. The result is a really distressed looking figure. We had taken a bunch of photos over the course of a few days of various textures from abandoned buildings, rusted metal and so forth and she created this weird backdrop and made everything is teal colour that really added to the eeriness of the image.

The artwork was done before I had finished writing lyrics to all the music. Having my girlfriend become this very powerful representation of a character really helped me figure out my vocal delivery and helped me connect to the character I was vocalizing since I was able to make it all that more personal.