Deicide frontman Glen Benton recently joined The Brutally Delicious Podcast. He talked about the album cover for ‘Banished By Sin’ and said their enemy is the same as Metallica’s.
He explained why he doesn’t do the same artwork over and over again. Benton implied that some thieves tried to steal the artwork, and they were the same people who stole from Metallica.
He mentioned Metallica’s Napster case and said it’s a big issue with illegal downloading:
“But here’s the thing, how hypocritical it is, because my art was being stolen [through illegal downloading] and stepped all over in the ’90s. Metallica had seen it come and they tried to stop it. But all these wannabe mercenaries for artists and all these idiots out there, they were the same people right there stealing my art back then. So where were all you guys at to defend my art being stolen and taken advantage of?”
He then mentioned the recent album cover art and added:
“So, all I did was just did an album cover, really, that just focused on the whole modernization of the modern time and, really, it’s just a reflection of the age that we’re in right now. I can’t spend my days trying to explain this. I have a saying: I don’t try to convince stupid is dumb and I don’t try to convince dumb is stupid. So I just let it do its thing and piss people off. I have a great time with it. It’s hilarious. Yeah, it is what it is, man. It’s meant to stir the sh*t paddle, and that’s what I do.”
Benton doesn’t blame Napster, though.
What Are The Claims?
On February 9th several accounts on X shared what they claimed to be Deicide’s new album cover for their upcoming release. Some fans speculated that the band might have used AI to create the cover art. Still, Deicide dropped their new track ‘Sever the Tongue’ on February 14 and shared details on their upcoming album. The album cover first surfaced on Blabbermouth and confirmed that the rumored image was indeed the real image for the cover.
After receiving complaints about the album art, one fan noticed that the artwork used for ‘Sever the Tongue’ had been updated. It’s unclear whether the band will use the art as their album cover or change it until April 24.
The Fan Discussion Of AI vs. Deicide
The controversy escalated even more as it spread to fan forums and social media platforms. A user on Reddit shared his thoughts about the matter. They wrote:
“I’m a musician and I have zero visual artist skills. My music doesn’t give me any sense of visual imagery. What the fuck am I supposed to do when I want to release something? Should I just continue to use free stock imagery? Should I pay someone on Fiverr for something that I have no idea of what I’m looking for? Because I’ll tell you now I’ve literally done that and it seemed like a pain for the artist who kept asking me questions about what I wanted and all I could muster was ‘Uhhh I don’t know, something cool?’”
The user added that they were okay with the use of AI:
“I really just don’t see the problem with people using AI art in general. Can someone who holds a strong position in opposition to mine explain to me what the big deal is?”
As a response to their question, one user commented that AI is taking artists’ original works and blending them into something else ‘unethically’:
“The difference is that a human had the idea to put it together to create something new. AI art is just unethically taken images put through the meat grinder of technology to generate uncreative lazy slop so the c*nts that invented it don’t have to pay actual artists, even though being an artist is already not a job you can always make a living on because the market is so saturated. It’s trying to solve a problem where there wasn’t one.”
You can watch the interview below.