Behind The Artworks: Trog - Of Vomit Reborn (Single) (2022)

We decided that the title track was going to be ‘Of Vomit Reborn’, not only because we felt that it was probably the strongest song of the bunch, but because it contained the most disgusting lyrical subject matter on the EP by far, and we thought it would make for a fantastic visual. I won’t spoil the lyrics here, but I will include an excerpt from an email Pete (our vocalist) sent to the rest of the band a while back when he first came up with the idea for the song:

“It's essentially a love story if you think about it...

So a guy loses the woman of his dreams to some freak accident, and he completely snaps as a result of all the pain and loneliness. He begins to hunt and dismember women of all shapes and sizes, collecting only the body parts from each victim that most closely resemble his deceased lover. Meanwhile, he spends his remaining free time chiseling out his concrete basement floor into the shape of his ideal mate. Once perfection has been met across both fronts he thaws out the victims, eats them, and then quickly regurgitates them into what is essentially a mold for his reborn bride to be. [...] We put so much more work into this EP than our debut (2019’s ‘Cave Dweller’), and we wanted all of that effort to be visually represented right up front. We wanted an album cover that would catch eyes and spark curiosity. We wanted it to be gory and gross, but not so much so that it became totally unsettling. We also knew we wanted to include some 80s-horror-inspired synth passages on the EP, so we thought it would be cool to reflect that vibe in the artwork as well. Given this criteria, it was pretty easy for us to decide who to hire for the job. He’s an Italian artist named Luca that goes by @solomacello on Instagram, and he has a huge body of work that absolutely nails the 80’s horror movie poster vibe. We were familiar with him mainly because he had done the artwork for Fulci’s latest record, “Exhumed Information” and we all thought that art looked sick. We also knew our EP was kinda similar in spirit combining death metal and horror synth.

Luca wasn’t particularly accustomed to designing gory artwork (the violence depicted within his usual horror designs is very much implied), but we asked him if he’d be willing to try it out for us and he said he’d be happy to. He sent us a few drafts over the course of a couple months and we hit him back with feedback. We feel like the artwork that resulted from this partnership was perfect for the music it was intended to represent. It’s gory and gross, but kinda endearingly cheesy at the same time. The colors pop, and the contrast between the purple and the green direct the viewer’s gaze straight to the action. We love it, and we’re super happy to see that other people seem to be loving it as well. We hope y’all enjoy the music just as much as the artwork!