The story behind Black Holes and Revelations album artwork
One of my favorites album cover of all time it is Muse’s Black Holes and Revelations Album. There’s so much story behind this picture. As a student of graphic design, I did a lot of work talking about this cover. So let’s begin.
Storm Thorgerson is the sleeve designer of this album. He’s an English graphic designer best known for his work with Pink Floyd on the cover of The Dark Side of the Moon. His projects are always a little bit surrealist even though he doesn’t consider himself as a surrealist artist.
While doing the cover art for BH&R, his mainly inspiration were the songs “Knights of Cydonia” and “Invincible”. The chosen concept for the cover was the Four Horseman of the Apocalypse, who are characters described in the last book of the New Testament of the Bible, called the Book of Revelation, but transcript to our modern world.
“The four man are sitting in an alien landscape around a sturdy wooden table with their symbolic nature represented by suitably decorated apparel. There were four miniature horses hanging around, as you tend to get. This sets thoughts was delivered directly from the music, which comprised three songs that seemed to evoke galloping (“Invisible” and “Knights of Cydonia” being two), along with a propensity musical grandness- majestic passages followed by thumping rhythms- with word “epic” or “biblical” coming to my mind, biblical horses become the four horseman of apocalypse, obviously, but hold on… Muse are a contemporary band so our four horseman needed to be represented not the evils of a medieval world — War, Hunger, Famine and Pestilence — but more contemporary evils. So what would they be?”
Storm Thorgerson in his book “The Raging Storm”
So it was decided that the four horseman would be Paranoia, Intolerance, Narcissism and Greed. In the cover art, you can see the respective characters:
- Mr. Paranoia: wears a suit of eyes, always watchful.
- Mr. Intolerance: wears a suit of patterned religious symbols.
- Mr. Narcissism: wears an outfit of many mirrors for he can never seen enough of himself.
- Mr. Greed: a suit of gold.
Not everything in the garden is rosy, the band had to fight with Storm over the details of the art. They didn’t want the small horses, who Storm had a particular affinity because it was the central feature to the generation of his idea. Besides, they didn’t like the landscape of Bardenas, Spain and asked to color it to something more similar with Mars.
The situation was resolved by the purchase of the copyright of the picture, with seems fair for both parties. As can be seen, in the first image it’s the band modification and the released form. The second one, it’s how the cover was supposed to be in Storm’s vision.
And you, what cover do you think is the best? Band's version or Storm's version?
