BLOODRIDE's STAMPEDE

Finnish Thrash Metal act, Bloodride, will release their new album "Deafening" in July 2025. Its sleeve illustration was created by fellow countryman artist, Niko Bauer, who has collaborated with the band in other projects.

“Niko has been providing us with occasional album art and other related graphics,” comments Bloodride’s bassist Esa Pennala. “The cover for 'Deafening' was already a candidate for the previous album but we finally settled on different artwork designed by Niko.”

At some point, the image of the five undead horses (which represent each of the band’s members) became a stage backdrop and was later reconsidered for Deafening’s cover. “The idea of using the backdrop came up again and that’s how we finally settled on this amazing cover art. So now, we use the artwork both as backdrops on stage and we put it on the sleeve of the new album.”

Bauer remembers that “the artwork started out with me wondering what a ‘bloodride’ actually would look like, which led to the mental image of having horses ride on and on until they rot away and are blown into the wind.” The original piece has a rectangular format and was painted with ink on paper. “It was drawn with old school steel nibs, the kind that you fix in a holder and dip into an ink bottle. First, I had to do research into what a horse’s skeleton actually looks like and I also had to try and get the result to be an ‘organized mess.’ So, I sketched the image twice with a pencil before starting with ink. When thinking about the style that I was going [to use] to draw the image, what I had in mind were very old copper engravings from history and biology books before all such images were replaced by photographs.”

The colors were mainly applied digitally. “I scanned the finished image and added color in Photoshop as well as some watercolor overlays,” Bauer says. “On projects like these, I use the computer for color for practical reasons [as] it’s very hard to make changes to a physical piece of art. And, when working on album cover artworks for bands, many different people are involved, and things tend to evolve and change a lot before everyone is satisfied with the end result.”

Bloodride’s "Deafening" will be released on July 25, 2025 through Wormholedeath. More information at https://bloodride.bandcamp.com/

See more of Niko Bauer’s work at: http://www.poorandstarving.com/index.php/en/