The metal genre often gives us graphic universes that are coming out as very sleek, and of course, Ghost is one of these bands where the aesthetic takes an enormous place in their creations. Let’s have a little glance to it just now!
If you’ve had the chance to hold a Ghost’s album in your hands, you already have noticed the different artworks for each song in the booklet. Indeed, the band had commissioned the Polish artist Zbigniew M. Bielak, known for an over-detailed and precise work.
His style is a mix of many inspirations, from printmaking to Flemish painting of the renaissance going through the profusion of Art Deco. The compositions are often symmetrical and detailed. The thin line accentuates these printmaking effects. In all this calculated and precise imagery, remembering the biblical, cult or religious aesthetic, we find some pop culture references, from films to books.
Because yes, Ghost, it’s also into pop culture references, all the time, for their albums covers but also for their merchandising. That’s how we go from Salem’s Lot with Opus Eponymous to Amadeus with Infestissumam or to the film Nosferatu from 1922 with the EP If You Have Ghost. All these artworks are not only from M. Bielak but show the importance and the influence of pop culture in the band. It’s even more visible with the merchandising where the band like to hijack well-known movie designs into their universe.
Ghost is a band that holds the desire to be a touch different from the traditional image of the metal genre universe, which generally has a darker and gloomy cover album, preferring a fine-lined work of diverted imagery that many know. Does that mean that pop culture is the new cult of the world?
