Behind The Artworks: Black Pyramid - Black Pyramid (2021)

The artwork was done by Michael “Warble” Finucane, that dude is amazing. We’d been corresponding a bit about music and art, so he showed me some of his work. He was doing this really wild fairy art in the vein of Brian Froud, and he had a great eye and touch for it. He also sent this weird, morphing psychedelic skulls he’d been doing as part of a series. So we started talking about some of my favorite artists and styles, Gustav Moreau and the French Symbolist movement, and I really liked his ideas on art and the philosophy behind his own works. We just gelled artistically when we spoke, so when it was time to commission the artwork for the album, he was immediately who we contacted. 

We met up and kicked around some ideas, I’d expressed a strong desire that he incorporate some of the elements of the fairy art into the album cover. I remember I’d drank quite a few beers when we met, as I was prone to do in those days, and so maybe I didn’t explain things all that well. The first version was a bit too on the whimsical side, so we talked more about something a bit darker, more ominous, and he drew out a sketch of his ideas which included a darker theme and the morphing skulls idea as well. That approach, incorporating the fairy art tradition, the art nouveau, the symbolist approach, along with Warble’s original ideas, that really panned out. I hope that we can work more together in the future, he was someone who just really got what we were going for, and he’s such a talented artist with such a unique idea and rich inner world.