British/American grindcore legends NAPALM DEATH will release their 15th studio album, "Apex Predator - Easy Meat", on January 27, 2015 (one day earlier internationally) via Century Media Records. The CD's striking artwork, which can be seen below, was created by Danish designer Frode Sylthe (Friktion.com), who has previously worked on the band's "Utilitarian" album as well as with such other acts as AT THE GATES, TOTALT JÄVLA MÖRKER, THE HAUNTED and BURST.
Comments NAPALM DEATH bassist Shane Embury: "There are many meanings that you could grab from the new album artwork, I think. But one is the representation of how our natural and most basic needs for happiness and communication are being stripped away by materialism and pre-packaged garbage — crap that we don't need, filtered to us through the media via the megacorporations with the goal to maintain the bloated bottom line of profit. It's all just stuff that will be obsolete in six months time. And behind the scenes, of course, modern-day slavery is alive, well and obscured by this facade. It's all an exercise in deceit to shower us with fake fulfilment, while the poor and underprivileged fall further by the wayside."
Adds NAPALM DEATH singer Mark "Barney" Greenway: "Across the albums, we have had some very complex and interconnected artwork. This time we wanted to keep it more simple — strip it down perhaps to a single image that would sharpen the focus.
"I loved the idea of the supermarket-style packaging as soon as I saw it, as when you go into one of those places with nourishment in mind and you're greeted with some miserable, artificially enhanced foodstuff contained in a bleak little receptacle of industrial plastics, it doesn't exactly inspire you. To then fill that plastic tray with the dregs of meat production, well, that is the 'easy meat' in the title — representing the people who suffer for burgeoning consumption degraded and dumped in the most pitiful way."