SLAYER 'Repentless' Cover Artist: 'I Just Wanted To Make It Look Like One Of The Classic Covers'

And Justice For Art recently conducted an interview with Brazilian designer/musician Marcelo Vasco about his latest design: the cover for SLAYER's long-awaited album, "Repentless". A couple of excerpts from the chat follow below.

And Justice For Art: [SLAYER] vocalist/bassist Tom Araya recently commented that SLAYER had a number of submitted ideas for the cover artwork. How did you become involved in the creation of this art and how did you submit your cover concept to the band?

Marcelo Vasco: I have been doing some artwork for [the] Nuclear Blast [record label] for a long time. They like my artwork style and know I'm a huge SLAYER fan, so they invited me to work on this, proposing some ideas and directions. They said that initially there were other artists also trying but would be nice if I could be involved. And that was what I did…

And Justice For Art: What inspired your particular idea/concept?

Marcelo Vasco: Everything I created was based on the album title and also on some ideas that could represent the "old-school" SLAYER approach. As a huge fan of the band, I just wanted to make it look like one of the classic covers, SLAYER being SLAYER!

And Justice For Art: This artwork really doesn't add anything new to SLAYER's previous blasphemous discourse. However, it definitely reinforces their unapologetic attitude especially towards religion. Conceptually, it's a sort of continuation of the themes explored in most of their previous covers. What's your opinion about this?

Marcelo Vasco: As I said… It's SLAYER being SLAYER. There's no point to be "new" or try any different, modern or experimental shit. It's boring! Metal is becoming so boring and gay today. I'm an old-school fan and my vision was exclusively that when I was creating the cover. I couldn't be happier with the final result. And, of course, all requirements and suggestions they gave me during the process were very solid and made the cover even more special. Looks like a classic SLAYER cover, and that's what I was expecting as the artist and as an old die-hard fan. I'm sure all REAL old-school fans of SLAYER will enjoy it somehow.

And Justice For Art: Most of your previous artworks have the tendency to be very symmetrical. This new cover breaks that mold for the most part. Despite having the Christ-like face in the middle as a focal point, you can look at the artwork and notice many different things happening. Was that lack of symmetry, a conscious effort?

Marcelo Vasco: That's true. But it was not exactly a conscious effort at all. I just thought that a more chaotic and unsymmetrical illustration would fit better for a SLAYER cover. As I mentioned before, when I started to create the drafts, I had some of their classic covers in my mind, like "Reign In Blood", "Hell Awaits" and "South Of Heaven", so maybe it subconsciously guided me a little.

Read the entire interview at And Justice For Art.