Cannibal Corpse is a band known for its brutal and extreme aesthetic, from its sound to its lyrics and music videos. The cover of the band's latest album, Violence Unimagined , was considered too graphic for the general public, and the group had to work on a censored version of the image to promote the album.
Created in partnership with longtime collaborator Vince Locke , the original cover depicted the same demonic woman with a fetus. In an interview with the website Heaviest of Art on the subject, drummer Paul Mazurkiewicz explained the concept of the image alongside the artist.
“I thought of the title 'Unimaginable Violence' and immediately thought it should be insane. (…) We ended up doing that censored version too, but man, what a great cover. I think it's one of our best and one of Vince's best,” Mazurkiewicz praised. “That's Cannibal Corpse right there. I'm glad we went down that road, because I know the fans reacted very positively.”
According to Locke, the original version resulted in distribution problems for the record label, so he worked on the second version as a "companion" to the first. "We'd love to have just one cover, of course. That's what you want. We're Cannibal Corpse and we should have a brutal cover," commented the drummer. "Man, come on! What year is this? It's just a work of art. It's not Metal Blade [record label] fault, of course, but it's ridiculous that we can't have a cover like that and leave it at that (...). In a perfect world, we'd just have one cover."
In an interview with the Knotfest channel , vocalist George Fisher also commented on the matter. “I have two daughters and I’m not angry about the cover. It’s disturbing, disgusting,” he admitted. “Some people got angry, they thought we were forcing a political agenda and we’re not. (…) Our agenda is very fast and brutal music, very fast, disgusting and brutal lyrics, very disgusting and disturbing album covers. If you don’t like it, leave.”
See the two cover versions below.
