Glass
Artery

About

Glass Artery is a progressive post-metal band hailing from Brooklyn, NY. Their sound is heavy but full of movement and variety. Their music has incorporates stylistic influences from black metal, ambient rock, and other genres of contemporary metal.

The Project

Album Art
Merch

An illustrated album cover showing two hands that fell from a marble statue, surrounded by marble debris. One holds a broken hourglass, the other tries to catch the sand as it falls.
An illustrated album cover depicting the three hands of the Fates of Greek mythology. Two hold an ouroboros on either side, and the third holds a pair of golden scissors to the snake, about to cut its neck.

Goals

The band was on the hunt for artwork for two releases: a single and an EP. They wanted album art that captured the thematic elements that tied the tracks together conceptually: the end of the world, Greek mythology, humanity’s hubris, and cycles of time. Both pieces needed to work across several formats and printing techniques, including screenprinting. This required a graphic style with limited color.

A merch t-shirt with custom illustrated album cover art, depicting marble statue hands holding a broken hourglass
A long sleeve merch t-shirt custom designed for a Brooklyn based metal band. The tee has the band name and a custom merch illustration.
A vinyl of a metal band on a record store shelf, with illustrated cover art.
A hand pulls a vinyl record off a shelf at the store, revealing the album art, which depicts an ouroboros and the hands of the three Fates of Greek mythology.

Thwaites
(Single)

The single “Thwaites”got us started down a path of Greek myth-inspired imagery, which we had a shared enthusiasm for. Hands of marble cracked off statues became characters in a surreal story where time slips away as destruction looms on the horizon. The chunks of broken marble structures and sand pouring from a shattered hourglass imply immense destruction and an inevitable end-times scenario.

Eternal
Return (EP)

For the EP release, we pulled directly from myth with the hands of the three Fates. These three sisters were expressions of the wheel of destiny. The ouroboros, which as many meanings across cultures, here serves as a reminder of humanity’s tendencies to repeat mistakes. In keeping with the theme of staring down the barrel of the end of days, the visual narrative evolved to be philosophical in nature. The imagery asks us, are we in an endless cycle of eternal return, or finally reaching a point of no return?

Album art for a Brooklyn prog metal band. The art shows two marble hands amongst rubble of broken marble, one holding a shattered hourglass, the other attempting to catch the falling sand.
Hands hold up a vinyl record to show the album art. The illustration depicts the hands of the three Fates holding blue ouroboros. The third hand reaches up with golden scissors to cut the snake at its neck.