Exhumed – Red Asphalt: Kuntswerk

“How come there is the front of a car in our practice space?” asked Sean McGrath. I answered something like lol don’t worry about it, Exhumed stuff. And also “I’ve got $50 worth of pig guts in my fridge rn.” And, basically, that’s all it took to create the album cover art for Exhumed’s newest record, Red Asphalt.

Amongst the Exhumed camp, we’d been discussing for a while about doing another photo cover ala Gore Metal. I’ve been back in the band for years, but no album seemed to have called for such a grotesque creation. That is, until we came up for the concept of Red Asphalt. We were touring and Matt asked, “Well, what should our next album be about?” or something like that. I looked around and realized what it should be. I answered, “What do we know more about that being on the road? We’re in a van. We’re on the road. And it’s the easiest way to die. What’s more death metal than that?” A lot of brainstorming followed and the concept for Red Asphalt was cemented.

Sebastian was particularly enthused about a return to an old-Exhumed style photo cover. He’s younger and started out as a fan of the band, so for him, it was nostalgic. For Matt, it made sense in a capitalistic way. For me… well, I’d done all the photo covers for Impaled after I got the boot from Exhumed, so for me it just meant more work. But I was happy to do it.

The first thing I sourced was an Exhumed license plate. Turns out, that’s a thing you can do on the Internet. I used to have a real official Exhumed California license plate, although it was spelled like “X-HUMED” and I hadn’t seen it years. It used to be on my old Honda Civic, a vanity plate that was gifted by an old friend. I searched high and low for it, but the last time I remember seeing it was when I dressed up as dead Cliff Burton at a Ludicra show and it hung around my neck for half the show.

One of the easiest props to acquire was part of a wrecked car. I was like, hey, I need part of a wrecked car, and the next day, Oakland provided. Every day on the way to work I see sheared off bumpers, broken glass, or an excised muffler. This part was easy as I live in a city that’s main charm is its being total shit.

Next I procured guts. In nostalgic Exhumed fashion, I went to a local chain called 99 Ranch where they sell a variety of pig guts and blood and also Pocki sticks. Yum. I bought a lot of intestines, filled them with water (an old trick gleaned from George Romero), and tied off the ends. I packed it all in my tiny Mini Cooper and headed off.

I work near the naval base in Alameda and I scouted a road that’s been closed since the pandemic. I liked it because it had a clear view towards the horizon. If I timed it just right, I would get a nice hazy sky lit only by the setting sun. Since I’ve been doing toy photos for the last few years, I really think about the lighting of the sky a lot. It was important to me that this photo was reality driven, a “fuck you” to A.I., and showed a real vision. In spite of some foot traffic, some actual traffic, and a nosy security guard, I was able to craft my scene in a very public setting.

My camera is a very old Canon Digital Rebel, the same camera I used to shoot the covers for Skarp, Impaled’s Death After Life, and the Ludicra’s The Tenant. It’s only 8 megapixels, but that would have to do because I’m on a god-damned budget and it’s what I got.

The steering wheel luckily appeared in a free bin at my work the day before I took the photo. The severed hand was a gift from talented SFX artist Kyle Huculak out of Edmonton from the time Ghoul visited his shop there in 2024. I was also able to make use of the same well-crafted severed hand for some fun Halloween costumes with my girlfriend where we each played Gomez and Morticia Addams on different days.

I had ordered some new lights, but sadly they didn’t arrive. I ended up using a kind of low-powered ring light along with my actual car headlights to light the scene as the sun went down. I also kept adding blood, both real pig blood and fake SFX blood, to the scene to get the right disgusting look.

Finally, finished with the photo shoot, I bagged everything up and threw the disgusting mess away. Hopefully, all anyone would notice the next day was a slight stain on the roadway that would wash away with the next rain.

And that was it. No A.I. needed to create a really gross and hopefully eye-catching cover, just some gumption and a few grocery items. Maybe I’m old and a bit of a curmudgeon or maybe I have some fucking (bad) taste. The point is, this shit isn’t hard. It just takes some Actual Intelligence to pull off.

The album releases on February 20, 2026. You can pre-order it from Relapse.com and check out the first single, “Unsafe at Any Speed” now on most any streaming platform or watch the video by Jim Stramel right now on YouTube.