Behind The Artworks: Dyer's Gate - Womb Of Absence (Single) (2026)

James Neddow, Dyer’s Gate’s drummer, created the artwork for Womb of Absence around the imagery and themes in the lyrics, particularly the corruption of care and the idea of abandonment turned into something predatory. The woman is Amelia Dyer, the baby farmer known as the “Ogress of Reading,” posed almost like a religious mother-and-child portrait with some influence from Victorian post-mortem photography. But instead of representing nurture, her body holds a void: the womb of absence. Something associated with creation, protection, and nourishment is transformed into the complete loss of those things. The way she cradles the child suggests tenderness and respectability, while everything else in the image reveals decay, sickness, and the absence of any real care.

The empty room was deliberate as well. James used it to reinforce the idea of absence, but also imprisonment, both figurative and literal after Dyer was caught. The emptiness, confinement, and stillness of the piece all tie back to the same idea in the lyrics: a caretaker presenting herself as a source of safety while embodying neglect, exploitation, and ruin. The whole image is meant to feel hollow, claustrophobic, and corrupted, as though everything nurturing has been stripped away and replaced with sickness.

Listen to Womb of Absence

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Lyrics:

How do you sleep? ×2

Separate the weak ×2

How do you sleep?

How do you sleep at night?

Separate the weak from the wounded

The rotting structure groans beneath her bloated footsteps

Every room is swollen with decay

Claustrophobic, decaying bodies left out in the open

Necrotrophic, disfigured vermin feeding off spilt infant entrails

Salt of the Earth

Safe from the Dirt

The smell alone could fucking kill you

She weaponized abandonment for profit

Another crying mouth extends this existence

Pestilence

Fermented

Malignant

Suffocated

Malnourished

Contagion

No remorse

Another burden erased

Empty promises fed the sickness into the womb of absence

Feed the sickness into the womb of absence

Feed the sickness

No absolution

Forever lurking beneath

Waiting for the chance to take everything

Separate the weak from the wounded

How do you sleep with all the lives you’ve ruined?

Separate the weak from the fucking wounded

How do you sleep at night

With all the lives you’ve ruined?

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