My work with Thotcrime

As Thotcrime’s core designer, I’ve built a visual language that appeals to the youthful nostalgia of early 2000’s internet culture while retaining the rough and gruff exterior of extreme metal. My work has extended vastly outside of just digital design with the group, including layout design for our bandcamp page, and graphic designs for our album art, j-card inserts, and CD prints. Thotcrime is an ongoing experiment for me, which allows me to pursue unorthadox visuals and digital drawings.

What is cybergrind, and where does it come from?

Cybergrind, as a genre, is a form of extreme music that get’s its name via the impossible to recreate nature of it’s electronic elements, and that it was born from the culture of online communities and the internet. The visual language for cybergrind is often chaotic, and at most layered behind several layers of irony and hard to decipher referential humor. When creating the visual language for Thotcrime, I set out to make something that felt reflective of these aspects of the genre, while retaining the youthful sincerity of growing up with the culture this genre was built upon in the late 2000’s and early aughts. Thotcrime’s visual language includes references to (mostly) anime, videogames, and myspace candy coated chaos similar to the work of artists such as Black Dresses, and visual designer and graphic novelist Remy Boydell. The visual language of the project embraces the absurdity of the internet with a smile, which makes it fun to experiment with future design endeavors.

Digital single Album Art

For our first LP, OnYourComputer, I designed three specific single album covers that would include a logo designed by our drummer dot, that would take influence from album art from bands such as Dr. Acula, Duck Duck Goose, and Iwrestledabearonce. These single covers were created using the same file, distorted, crushed, and textured with different backgrounds. Each album art layers on top of the other, with newer text for each single released.

ONYOURCOMPUTER Album Art

OnYourComputer was our first full length album released in november of 2020. The art used for this album was initially created as a shirt design to sell alongside the record. The inspiration for the design was pulled from late 2000’s monster tee-shirts from bands featured in hot topic clothing stores, and pulls major influence from designer Cory Curly Swope of zombieshark fame. This is a mixed media album art, using adobe photosohp collage for the texturing, and wacom digital drawing tablet for the robot design, used to shade and draw out the figure of the character.

ONYOURCOMPUTER Physical releases

ONYOURCOMPUTER has released on tape and CD, and for both of those I essentially used manipulated backgrounds, collaging over the already highly saturated illustration used for creating the initial album cover.

Other Designs

While working with thotcrime I have created art for various pieces of the project that have either been developed as concept art or eventual use in a future endeavor, whether it be a shirt, a sticker, or album art. This includes logos, collage, and original drawings that could potentially be part of the future of thotcrime.