The introduction of scientific imagery in the design here was a bridge that would carry over as the work shifted to the “With Teeth” body of work, which used scanner glitching as its base and overlaid elements derived from and inspired by scientific/medical imaging. I’ll talk more about that in a more in-depth patreon write-up about this soon.
Whenever this work comes around again, people always ask me about the “Bleedthrough” album, how different it was from “With Teeth,” etc and I think there’s this fan mythos that some entirely different album was scrapped and sits in a vault somewhere, but that’s not the case. Bleedthrough was just in-progress With Teeth demos, and what changed wasn’t the entire album, it was the new material that was added as recording moved from New Orleans to LA, how that affected the way older demos were completed, how the tracklist evolved, how perspectives shifted. Sometimes concepts change as inspiration changes, and the names and visuals you’ve been sitting with for almost a year don’t feel right anymore. If anything, what you saw at that time was a rare window into the creative process of how an album evolves, not the scrapping of a bunch of material to start from scratch. And the artwork, as well, evolved pretty organically from this into the “With Teeth” artwork.
Whenever this work comes around again, people always ask me about the “Bleedthrough” album, how different it was from “With Teeth,” etc and I think there’s this fan mythos that some entirely different album was scrapped and sits in a vault somewhere, but that’s not the case. Bleedthrough was just in-progress With Teeth demos, and what changed wasn’t the entire album, it was the new material that was added as recording moved from New Orleans to LA, how that affected the way older demos were completed, how the tracklist evolved, how perspectives shifted. Sometimes concepts change as inspiration changes, and the names and visuals you’ve been sitting with for almost a year don’t feel right anymore. If anything, what you saw at that time was a rare window into the creative process of how an album evolves, not the scrapping of a bunch of material to start from scratch. And the artwork, as well, evolved pretty organically from this into the “With Teeth” artwork.
I personally was really stoked when the art direction on nin.com shifted towards this style, and it's always cool to see it come off the shelves for a little show and tell.
You can find more when you click through to his post (and he's also on Bluesky) - and drop by Glitch Goods to see the latest prints and other products Rob's made available.