Look at the covers of all your favourite metal albums. While they will probably fall into a few different schools of design, you can bet not a single one looks like anything that came out of the 1950s jazz scene. But judging from Brazilian designer Rafael Melandi’s redesigns — maybe they should have.
The project, appropriately if not a little awkwardly dubbed “Metazz,” looks at iconic metal album covers through the lens of a 1950s jazz aesthetic. As Melandi told Decibel Magazine:
I find that [Blue Note-era] jazz records covers have the same force and intensity as metal albums do — not needing to represent them with shocking images like blood, gore and ‘scary’ illustrations like metal.
And it would certainly seem like he’s succeeded. Because while the classics are great, a few these — the Motörhead and Black Sabbath covers, specifically — are even better than the original.
You can check out each of the each of the new designs next to their original counterpart below or head over to Melandi’s Behance page for more of his work. [Behance via The Verge]
