original album cover art
- Sleeve 050/100: Senjutsu (2021)
- Studio Album by Iron Maiden
- Label: Parlophone
- Genre: Heavy Metal
- Original Cover: Artwork by Mark Wilkinson
This post is part of the 100 Sleeves: One hundred Album Covers Re-Designed project, a personal challenge I created for myself at the end of 2020. The goal is to create 100 album covers inspired by the music I’m enjoying at the moment.
SENJUTSU (loosely translated as “tactics and strategy”) is the seventeenth studio album by British heavy metal band Iron Maiden. Released in 2021, it has been part of my heavy rotation of music in 2022.
This album by Maiden immediately blew my mind. I’m always impressed by bands with long careers still making high-quality music, without over-repeating themselves. In a way, it still sounds like them, but differently.
Heavy metal with hints of progressive, having songs that last as long as 12 minutes… And I’m a sucker for lengthy song tracks.
My favorite songs from the album are:
- The Writing On The Wall
- Darkest Hour
- Death Of The Celts
- The parchment
- Hell On Earth
So pretty much the whole of Disc 2 and one song from Disc 1 🤣 This doesn’t mean I don´t like the other songs, just that they haven’t gotten stuck in my head for days unstopped as the others. Overall I think Maiden did a great job with this album as a whole.
Album Cover Art Redesign by franzmori. This is fan art, no copyright infringement is intended.
About the album cover art
Despite the album not being conceptual or about Japan at all, I took inspiration from the traditional Japanese art Ukiyo-e, following the art created for the original release.
For the color palette, I took inspiration from the official animated video of “Writing On The Wall”. I especially like the scene of Samurai Eddie engulfed in green flames. I based my composition on a photograph by Ryunosuke Kikuno of the Statue of the great samurai Kusunoki Masashige, and I added a dragon in the background thinking of the dragons in the “Stratego” animated video.
