Behind The Artworks: Balmog - Eve (2021)

An album cover should reflect what the listener is going to hear, in some ways, it must be like a transparent skin that reveals the inner organs and bones. Eve is a risky album from many points of view as it is deeply personal and with a clear claim of being original, so the cover must walk also in that way. The concept behind the cover was very clear before starting with the art-work. There is a story by a Galician writer named Alfonso Rodriguez Castelao in which a skeleton has a glass eye that allows him to see once he is dead, serving as a link between the world of the living and the dead. That skull appears between a large V that forms the title Eve, symbolizing the moment before a tragic event that is about to take place. We thought that idea was very interesting for the album cover. It seemed original to us, and it also followed the line of our artwork in which we always included a skull. But we wanted to go one step further, look for something controversial and why not say it, risky and provocative. So far there has been two Balmog covers that we think have been very decisive from an art point of view: Svmma Fide and Pillars of Salt. For this album we wanted something away from Black Metal and even from the metal parameters. So that was the reason why we asked Branca Studio to create the cover, we knew it would be the right thing to reflect that kind of visuals, and we were certainly not wrong, we got just what we were looking for. We used a much more basic and punk aesthetic, in fact it could pass for a cover of some postpunk band from the 80s. It is clear that there is not going to be a middle ground, people are going to love it or they are going to hate it, but that was what we were looking for, something provocative that did not leave the viewer indifferent, looking on the one hand for that link with our past (use of a skull) and on the other for that more caustic and postpunk aesthetic.