Oblivion Waits

Overview

Await the Dawn is a metal band from Albuquerque, New Mexico. They approached me to create a logo for their band, a single cover, the EP cover for their first release, and a visualizer for Spotify. I guided the band through their first effort to brand themselves and led the creative direction for the band’s first artworks.

Await the Dawn released Oblivion Waits on Halloween of 2023.

Approach:

At the time the band approached me they were still very early in the process of creating music as a group. We tapped into the various elements of the members character, interests, and backgrounds to distinguish a starting direction for the band’s aesthetic and word mark.

Logo

Creating something that was distinct and legible, yet still aggressive were some of the main takeaways from my first meetings with the band. I designed their mark to have strong movement, and aggressive shapes without cluttering up the letters too much. Creating a strong symmetrical look helped the mark identify itself clearly with the rock/metal genres but more on the side of rock rather than extreme metal with the clean letters. Finally, roughing up the type gave it an even more aggressive look, and the iron sun at the top helped connect their mark with the sentiment of their name.

Gospel of the Godless (Single)

As their first piece of artwork we used the single cover as a playground to explore ideas. The song was written about the weaponization of religion so it has a lot of dark themes. I wanted to create strong imagery for the cover that would reflect those themes and illuminate them in a cool way. The final artwork depicts a fearful young human being slowly corrupted and overpowered by demonic, withered hands of religious creatures inside of a tortured fever dream-like reality.

Oblivion Waits (EP Cover)

After finding a good rhythm with the single cover, we embarked on the EP cover. The band had a few songs written at the time but not the complete EP. From what the band did have I was able to interpret a lot of themes of mental toil and struggle. Members of the band shared their individual stories and writings for the music to help illuminate the final direction for the art. The Oblivion Waits cover reflects those stories with a tortured character who wears a blinding crown of light battling a maelstrom of demons. This graphic captures the aggressive, tumultuous, and hopeful energy of the group I feel and creates a compelling visual motif for listeners to enjoy.