Editor’s Note: Welcome to the first official entry in a new music column we’re calling “Under Cover.” One of the most exciting parts about discovering new music is familiarizing yourself with an album’s cover, but unfortunately, this seems to be a part of record reviews that goes vastly unnoticed. To combat this epidemic, we’re introducing this column and allowing our music writers the opportunity to tell us why they think their chosen album covers are super cool. Enjoy!

Artist: Death Grips

Album: No Love Deep Web

Release Date: Oct. 1, 2012 (self-released)

If there was one artistic course of action that experimental “hobo” rap pioneers Death Grips decided to enact on a whim, it was canceling an entire supporting tour for their first album in order to release a second full-length album during the same year of 2012. If there was another exercise of creative control that served as the biggest middle finger to former record label Epic, it was self-releasing/leaking the band’s sophomore album with the title No Love Deep Web Sharpied across drummer Zach Hill’s erect penis.

Though, it should come as no surprise that Death Grips have expressed an outlandishly surreal and at times vulgarly hysterical art style and vision for their work. Their self-directed videos alone range from dryers rotating with cannabis, cash, and frontman MC Ride’s unfinished beer to montages of dying beetles, Ferris wheels, and bum fires. All things considered, it’s clear that the same inspiration translated to their debut album The Money Store’s cover featuring a cigarette-dragging woman chained to her breasted-male-sex-slave with “Death Grips” carved in between his chest. But many media outlets wondered, in addition to online music distributors, if the same level of modern, grotesque art could extend to a quick iPhone selfie capturing the phallus in question.

Death Grips’ site promoting No Love Deep Web proudly declares that, in spite of U.S. censorship disclaimers covering graphics sexual material, “We consider this art.” After all, both Hill and Ride have defended the photo’s overtones of deconstructing masculinity and embracing shamelessness when they decided on tagging the image to the leaked album last October. To their defense, while the off-green, hotel bathroom tile isn’t the flashiest piece of eye-candy, Hill’s penis does, admittedly, come close to hitting the center of the image. If the cover were flipped, one could almost detect a haphazard axis of symmetry at work.

Or, if the cover cannot attach any classically artistic merit to itself, No Love Deep Web could just be a picture of Hill’s genitalia with no contest. But even so – even if the cynics of the music world decide that the only artistic bit of the cover resides within the seamless alignment of the wall tiles – Hill’s penis could illustrate the strange, eclectic wrecking ball of perplexity that Death Grips strapped us to while demolishing everything they so desired in 2012. Getting signed to their first major record label and subsequently leaving Epic on ugly, hostile terms in just over half a year was no small feat, and neither was posting publicly on Facebook the very emails that the label carried on the dispute through. In the wake of the bridge burning, neither Hill nor Ride announced profound declarations of artistic freedom or condemnations the tyranny of record corporations. If it weren’t for interviews with Spin and the likes, it almost seemed as if there was no reason. The band just went right back to work. No Love Deep Web’s cover could serve no reason, and that in itself could be the point.

After all of the disputes, chaotic live shows that have yet to be, and a purportedly financially at-risk Death Grips, we’re left with no distribution company, a thirteen-track album, and a stimulated penis already being substituted with alternative images such as a foot, a Subway sandwich, repeating images of crying baby faces, a banana, and a counterintuitive vagina. As far and frequent as these alternate covers surface, most of them are humorously fan-edited from Death Grips aficionados all across the Internet, including users from 4chan’s music board, /mu/, where the band often unloads its alternate-reality games designed to hype future projects. Even the “official” alternative artwork doesn’t take itself seriously – or at least as seriously as a pair of knee-high socks with “Suck My Dick” stitched can be taken. There’s no doubting that the original artwork similarly doesn’t take itself seriously, but for the oddest reason, it doesn’t arouse a single chuckle. Far from mesmerizing, of course, but if one strips away Ride’s claims of artistic finesse and Hill’s feelings of physical compromise, No Love Deep Web’s telltale penis delivers the faintly ever-present message of musical, corporatized, and spiritual defiance whether or not it wishes to admit it.

Disjointed and disorienting, Ride’s bastardized spoken word rhymes distort every formula that The Money Store constructs and, in turn, creates a filthily catchy introduction to No Love Deep Web with “Come Up and Get Me.” In a sense, this is what Death Grips have been coaxing Epic, taunting critics, and lavishing fans with since their conception. Crude and vulgar, the fearlessness that Hill attributed to his erection births the collective essence of the record as an album that contorts, confuses, and refreshes during a year that saw the release of several ham-fisted sophomore albums that gave more of the same and less of the unsupervised rawness of booming tracks like “Lil Boy,” “World of Dogs,” and “Bass Rattle Stars Out the Sky.” Wholly underproduced compared to The Money Store, Death Grips crafted a stripped down version of whatever-the-hell vision was currently going through their heads, leaving No Love Deep Web as a vulnerable album very much at the risk of a dynamic struggle between tightening the screws too much or loosening them too little. In all its bareness, Hill’s exposed penis coincides with the album’s coldness and cacophonous background void.

In a counterculture-ish punk rock fashion, ’s phallic-centric cover exists to appall, appease, and abash the fine line of conventional standards that Death Grips blazed past at 120 mph. Or Zach Hill just took a dick pick and MC Ride slapped it on an album cover for kicks and giggles, no more, no less.