Behind The Artworks: ABSTRACTED - Hiraeth (2026)

The visual concept of the album directly reflects the meaning of the word Hiraeth: a deep longing for something that can never truly be recovered — a home, a state of mind, or a lost version of oneself.

The artwork represents this emotional and existential displacement. It is not merely nostalgia, but a permanent absence — a void that follows the entire journey of the album. Each track is a fragment of this impossible search for belonging, balance, and redemption.

The artwork of Axis is built around archetypal and universal symbols that reinforce the album’s core concept: balance, duality, and transformation.

The burning tower, standing at the edge of the sea, represents human-made structures — belief systems, ideologies, dogmas, or mental states — reaching their point of collapse. Fire symbolizes destruction, but also purification and renewal: something must fall in order for something else to emerge. Its isolation, surrounded by water, suggests an internal and inevitable breakdown, almost ritualistic in nature.

The sea symbolizes the unconscious, the continuous flow of existence, and time itself. It both separates and connects the elements in the scene, acting as the space where transformation occurs — never static, always in motion.

In contrast, the stag embodies nature, intuition, spirituality, and a connection to something primordial. Across many cultures, the stag is seen as a guide between worlds, a symbol of renewal, awareness, and inner balance. While the tower burns — a product of human construction and control — the stag stands firm, representing the natural equilibrium that exists beyond artificial structures.

The sunlight serves as a symbol of clarity, consciousness, and revelation. It illuminates the scene without interfering, reinforcing the idea of witnessing and accepting the cycle of destruction and rebirth.

The reverse artwork of the record directly mirrors the cover, presenting the opposite state: day and night, light and shadow, consciousness and the unconscious. Together, they function as a yin and yang, where opposing forces do not cancel each other out, but instead coexist and complete one another. One cannot exist without the other.

This visual dialogue strengthens the concept behind Axis: everything revolves around an invisible central axis. Losing this axis leads to imbalance and collapse; rediscovering it restores equilibrium. The cover and the reverse are not separate images, but two perspectives of the same reality — two states within the same cycle.

Ultimately, the artwork visually translates what the album conveys musically and lyrically: the search for balance amid rupture, the reconnection with essence after collapse, and the acceptance of duality as an inherent part of existence.