Mattias Alkberg – Häxor album art
Häxor (“Witches”) is the latest album by Swedish poet, songwriter and musician Mattias Alkberg. It was released by Teg Publishing in April 2021.
At the center of Graham Samuels’s symmetrical cover art is a tied-up woman who’s being burnt at the stake, suffering with lips and eyes firmly closed. She’s surrounded by floating grabbing hands, antlers, smashed TV sets, bombs, and a machine gun. In the background, we see dozens of other women, some depicted as hovering heads staring at the viewer, and others floating up and disappearing into the night sky, leaving the disturbing scene behind. On his website, Alkberg mentions that masculinity is an important theme of the album: “The whole disgusting masculinity that permeates and poisons this shitty society at the expense of women and children in particular.”
For the typography, cover designer Eva Wilsson employs a combination that’s similar to the one seen on the book jacket of Pola Oloixarac’s novel Mona: Eckmannpsych (2018) is used for the title, with the name shown below in an italic typeface with similar qualities, at a smaller size and brought to the same width. In this case, the second typeface is Lisbeth Display (2017). It was designed by Louisa Fröhlich as an extreme variation of and single-style companion to her all-italic Lisbeth family. Here it echoes the pronounced horizontal contrast from the line above. While the amorphous Eckmannpsych looks as if it was made from microwaved plastic, Lisbeth Display’s letterforms with the pinched stems rather resemble twisted strips of paper.
Note that in this preview image, Alkberg’s name is capitalized, unlike in the final version. I wouldn’t be surprised if the decision to set the title “Häxor” in all lowercase was made to avoid Eckmannpsych’s uppercase H, which follows the original Eckmann with its – nowadays unusual – blackletter-inspired construction. It was then only consequent to render the artist’s name in all-lowercase letters, too.
