This one has always just freaked me out. It's not so much dreadful to me as it is terrifying.



This is for Sorrowseed's Portents EP. The foggy, burnt out cityscape always had that appropriate feeling of "severely bad shit has happened" for me.



And another Sorrowseed one. Technically the back cover from The Extinction Prophecies, but since it's a double album I've always considered it the second front cover.

I hope I never end up dying like this, desperate & alone. So sad.

Also, I must say that that Leviathan cover posted early is probably the most depressingly terrifying album cover I've ever seen.

Damn I personally like the Amebix and Locrian covers , they are fantastic. Amebix has to be a mass execution during WW II. Truly terrifying to think about that being so dramatically captured for eternity.

Locrian cover looks like it might be Pipyrat the ghost city within the Chernobyl exclusion zone. Very cool and dreadful stuff.

I'm glad the thread has remained on track and everyone has gotten the meaning of dread pretty much spot on. Found some good shit here too, thanks and cheers!

Don't know if you noticed all of those silhouettes in the background. I've always assumed they were spirits gathering around the recently deceased, silently stating somethin akin to "we've been expecting you". Not dreadful, but eerie as all hell.

None of these have really felt like dread to me yet. The Leviathan one is very powerful, but I'm seeing hopelessness.

Perhaps because I was fifteen at the time, I always got a perfectly unsettled feeling from Kind Diamond's Them. It has that foreboding ambiance akin to the Overlook Hotel or Bates Motel.




And these dudes were far better "purveyors of the weird" before I realized they were beekeepers. I'd thought they had heads of solid wood and were something out of a fever dream.






Does anyone know what this is? It's my favorite album by one of my favorite bands, but damned if I know what the hell is going on here. Part of me wants my imagination to remain blissfully unshackled by certainty.

Those are the "dragon's teeth" along the German border during WW2.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dragon%27s ... ication%29

some kind of tank/armored vehicle barricade I'd assume.

Love that charcoal cover of the Sorrowseed cityscape. Reminds me of this dude James Castle who would do these really freakish landscapes out of charcoal drawn on old paper grocery bags.

Best covers for me are the really stark, black and white grainy photos, that portray a gritty realism mixed with a sense of dread. Those work far better for me than some illustrated cartoonish demon/monster thingy. The Winter "Into Darkness" cover is probably the best example here.

Say what you will about their music, but the cover of the first Korn album conveys a sense of dread. Some dude with a hook for a hand casting a shadow over some little girl? Yeah.

Seeing only one face in a man's chest as well as the dark blue colors here made me shiver a bit.

The backside of the K in their logo also gives the effect that the little girl is hanging from a noose.

Wolok - Servum Pecus
The artwork is taken from Beksiński, there are better works of his than this one definitely but it's still worth mentioning. The music on this album definitely fits the cover, too. Many other bands also used his work for album covers (Leviathan, Drowning the Light, Blood of Kingu among others mentioned on MA.)

That one is actually one of my favourites as him, usually his corpsecluster things look frozen and dead, that one looks like it's writhing its way around your house.

I find the black-and-white colouring a turn-off. As often as it help creating dread atmosphere, it doesn't do it for me in this case (or Beksiński's works in general.)

Portrays a sense of impending doom and nothingness. Being sucked into a void where chaos reigns and darkness is embraced. Reminds me of this quote from Milton: Abashed the Devil stood and felt how awful goodness is.

The coverart from Mitochondrion's demo Through cosmic gaze always captured my attention. I know its an original painting but it just has that eternal/epic scale that I adore about those older paintings, the music is decent but the coverart more or less cemented the demo when I owned it in my mind.

^^^

It's not an original painting; I'm fairly sure it's one of Gustave Doré's Divine Comedy-related works. It also appears in the inlay artwork on Frostkrieg's Das astrale Fenster.

I always thought this one was interesting. The music on it reflects it perfectly, as well.



Not really portraying dread much, but this one used to scare the shit out of me when I was in my early teens and haven't heard black metal before, so I thought I'd throw it in. Amazing album, I might add.

goddamnit, was this like an internet thing? cause i remember seeing like a whole page of that shit, oh well-went right over my head for sure

That's a drawing of Heaven.

Although, spending eternity in a place that probably discourages metal would be pretty dreadful.

Yeah's, that's Dore's art of the final part of the Divine Comedy, where Dante and Beatrice speak to God.

I would really not like to be at whatever shore these guys land at.

The circle structure reminds me of The Wild Hunt (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wild_Hunt).

Also, just now realized how metal that thing is.

Don't know how this hasn't made the list yet

Been on an OMC kick recently.

Is it just me or does that cover look like a Seth Siro Anton job?

It was definitely the beginning of when his cover arts started to look the same.

Warning's 'Watching From a Distance'. I don't know... The simplicity of the cover art is so dreadful, yet powerful. I love how the character just blends with the background, almost invisible. Reaching for nothingness, I must say.

This thread is best enjoyed with coffee, toast, and a purring cat next to your laptop. Furthermore, children laughing outside and the sun spilling fourth golden light also compliment it quite nicely.

Nothing says dread quite like the cover of Billy Squire's Don't Say No.

I like all the Doom metal album covers you guys posted.
Really surprised no one posted this one tough:

Tyranny - Tides of Awakening (2006)
It's clealt Cthulhu staring at R'lyeh's ruins.


Also, Catacombs - In the Depths of R'lyeh.

This one has always stuck out to me as one of the saddest, most dreadful pieces of art I've seen on an album. Captures the album's atmosphere so well. Fuck, even the horse looks sad.

Strange as this may sound, the cover of Stained Class has always unnerved me a little.

I'm not sure what it is about it, but... but... well, just look at the damned thing:



It's like a futuristic simulation of the Kennedy assassination run on the mainframe of Skynet. Or something. It's very inhuman, and, speaking of The Terminator, reminds me a little of the T-1000 from T2. People shouldn't be that shiny; I think it's an early example of the uncanny valley, in my case.

Mass graves always gave me a sense of dread. It reminds me of those stories from Nazi occupied countries where unwanted people were lined up and executed one at a time. The people must have felt such dread, and hopelessness. This portrays that exact dread I think.

This cover for Agalloch's first demo always was a bit unsettling to me. The picture is very dreary. It appears that one man is pushing on the others shoulders with his legs so as to hasten his death. The scene always raises questions in my mind. What is going on, why is he driven to kill the other man? Can't deny the badassedness of it though.

The original picture was done by Gustave Doré, who made the picture used in the Mitochondrion demo which was posted earlier. He also apparently did the original picture used for Anaal Nathrakh's In the Constellation... as well. A quick google search and you'll find most of his pieces are in the same vein.

The fear in the animal's eyes and the ghostly reflection make me feel kinda uneasy.

also this one: