Behind The Artworks: HKSPK - Heimkehr (2026)

The artwork for Heimkehr is an original oil painting created specifically for HKSPK by German artist Steffen Schmolke.

Schmolke also created the artwork for the single “Rot In Despair”, as well as several smaller woodcuts for the album booklet.

The connection between the painting and Heimkehr is not meant to represent “coming home” in a literal sense. It is much darker than that.

At the centre of the painting is a figure wrapped almost completely in bandages, bent over a table and writing with a quill.

The bandages can be seen as wounds, restraints, armour and a burial shroud at the same time. The figure looks as though it has survived something terrible, but has not escaped it. Everything around it is swallowed by darkness.

For us, this connects with Heimkehr on several levels.

First, there is the idea of returning to oneself.

The bandages represent the wounds someone carries back from their own “war”. The figure is alone and writing. In that sense, writing becomes a way of finding a path back into one's own mind and confronting what remains there.

Heimkehr is therefore not necessarily about returning to a physical home. It can also mean trying to put yourself back together after everything that has happened.

The second connection is memory.

The long strips of paper almost resemble bandages being unwound. Each one can be understood as another part of a story or memory being exposed and written down.

This connects particularly strongly with the final moments of the title track:

“I lay down the pen

There is no reason

To write new words again”

The writer's homecoming happens through the act of writing the final words.

And finally, there is Heimkehr as a burden.

The figure has returned, but the bandages are still there.

Someone can arrive home physically while part of them remains trapped in what happened before. It is a homecoming without healing.

That is probably the most important connection between the title and the painting.

This is not an image of a joyful return.

It is the homecoming of someone wounded: returning, sitting down and finally writing out everything that has been consuming them.

The wounds remain.

But the words come out.

That contrast is also why the title Heimkehr works so well for us. The word itself can initially sound warm, familiar and almost comforting.

The artwork turns that expectation into something much darker and more fatalistic.

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