Cover Artwork for Imperial Domain’s New Album Portentum

I created the cover artwork for Portentum, the latest album by Swedish melodic death metal band Imperial Domain. Before the album release, the band also released the single Retribution, for which I designed the cover artwork as well. Imperial Domain’s Portentum continues the band’s long-running work in melodic death metal and marks another chapter in my visual collaboration with the band.

This collaboration did not come out of nowhere. I had previously designed the cover artwork for Imperial Domain’s earlier album The Deluge, so working on Portentum and Retribution felt like a natural continuation of that relationship.

Both new covers are based on graphic artworks I originally created approximately ten years ago. When Imperial Domain contacted me about the new release, I immediately felt that these pieces had the right atmosphere, visual weight, and sense of darkness for the band’s music. They were not originally created as album covers, but sometimes an image simply waits for the right context — like some cursed relic in a dusty archive, except with better file management.

For Portentum and Retribution, I reworked and adapted the original graphics to serve the format, mood, and identity of the releases. The goal was not merely to reuse old artwork, but to bring the images into a new context where they could support the music and strengthen the overall visual impact.

Imperial Domain’s new material deals with dark historical and contemporary themes, combining aggression, atmosphere, and melodic death metal intensity. That direction called for cover artwork that does not over-explain itself, but immediately communicates tension, threat, and a sense of something ominous approaching.

Designing album covers often comes down to finding the right visual language for a band’s sound. In this case, artworks created a decade earlier found a new life as part of Imperial Domain’s world. The result is both a continuation of my earlier The Deluge collaboration and a new chapter in my work within the international metal scene.

Through Bandmill, I continue to create album covers, logos, visual identities, promotional materials, and other graphic design work for bands, artists, labels, and music-related projects in Finland and abroad.