Behind The Artworks: Leach - Hymns For The Hollow (2018)

We knew that we wanted artwork that in a pretty sublime way reflected the title of the album – something that creates a feeling of hollowness or emptiness.

At first I did a couple of test designs where I played around with making the artwork look something similar to an obituary, but failed to make it look like we wanted. We therefor decided to scrap the initial ideas and start over.

Much of the arty stuff that I make tends to look broken, distorted and pretty grungy but I still wanted a different angle from what I use to do for the band. Which I think reflects my personality in lots of ways, since a lot of the things I own tend to be somewhat broken and wornout!

At the time (and still) I started to get into things like vaporwave, synthwave and glitchart which are in some ways all related more or less. The problem with these genres of pop-culture is that they are kind of light hearted so I had to get a pretty rough edge. So I ended up using some of the techniques I always use to make it a bit grungy.

Either way, I started out by taking a photo of the bands singer and guitarist Markus. And retouched it removing all of his facial features. The effect on the face is done using a technique called pixel sorting which gives the impression of the face almost being smudged out pixel by pixel.

The background is made my morphing together a lot of layers abusing adjustment layers in photoshop and distorting different picture elements by manipulating its raw data (i.e open up the image in a texteditor and removing and misplacing large strings of data).

The end result turned out to be something very digital and distorted that we really feel catch the vibe and theme of the album. Hope you enjoy the it as much as we do!