Behind The Artworks: MISOPHONIA - (De)void Of Peace (2024)

This is a crazy crazy story... Back in October 2022, we released our 2nd single for Sliptrick Records the Sorrows of Yesterday pts I & ii maxi single. In November 2022 we received an email from Mr Jobert Melo of Sledgehammer Graphix offering his services. We don't know how he found us but he did and said he would love to work with us should we be interested. We were like what the hell Jober Mello is the artist behind 4 Sabaton releases, the 1x gold-certified Coat of Arms, 1x Gold & 4x platinum-certified Carolus Rex, and Sabaton battles for the Baltic Sea Live releases. Jobert was also the artist behind 2 Primal Fear releases Unbreakable & Delivering the Black., Why would he want to work with an unknown Scottish band? We kept in toocaaanear later Jobert was still interested in working with us so we could not pass up this opportunity.

What Jober delivered was beyond what any of us could have imagined. Normally Jay would handle art edit stuff but we thought this was our debut album it needed to look the part. The concept behind the works in hindsight amazes us. Jay initially shared some visual ideas he had come up with, along with a color pallet of sorts. Jobbert then went above and beyond and the final cover is now very special to us as Jobert actually looked over our history and listened to our music and he took the main elements of our past logos/art output and incorporated it into the 1 album cover.

1. The skull, our original logo was MisophoniA in 'our' font which was held within the open jaws of a vampire skull.

2. The MisophoniA font. Jobert took the font we had adopted as our own and enhanced it adding his own flair but still remaining true to the original.

3. The serpents were lifted straight from one of our lyrics 'A serpent sheds its dying skin because new skin needs to breathe' a subtle nod to some but a nod nonetheless.

4. The Spectre and his scythe, this ominous grim reaper-style antagonist was our music video director/storyboard writer Enzo's creation. The specter was created as the main antagonist for the Silencio music video. An omnipresent otherwordly being that seemed to manifest as the physical embodiment of misophonia music. In our video, the scythe was the light we followed and along with the spectre acted as our spiritual guide leading us to where we needed to be and showed where we were to go next...

5. The 2 crows on the specter cloak. One for sorrow two for joy, another subtle yet brilliant nod to our music. The original artwork for Sorrows of Yesterday featured a singular crow flying towards the specter, our misophonic ying and yang coming together in harmony the dark silhouette of the crow flying against the light of the moon towards the specter who stood with its hand outstretched beckoning the crow to come forth We were absolutely blown away by all these subtle nods to our music. The finished product was just beyond our expectations we knew we would get something good but we got something phenomenal. Needless to say, we shall be working with Jobert again for this albums follow-up, we may be waiting ' Forever and a Day' for that though, for now however this 'Battles Fought'