Suffocation’s Pierced From Within Cover Art Has Never Looked the Way It Was Meant to Look

This May will mark the 25th anniversary of the release of Pierced From Within, the rightly-lauded third full-length album from Suffocation. A momentous occasion, to be sure… except that, as it turns out, we’ve all been looking at an incorrect version of the cover art for a quarter of century.

First, some information on how album covers are made, for those of you who don’t know. Basically, the way it works is this:

An artist is hired to create an image. That original piece of art is then turned into something called a “transparency,” which a designer then uses to make the final cover as we know it (e.g., with the band’s logo, the album title, etc.). Some artists make their own transparency, which they then give to the label, presumably so as not to risk losing the original piece. Others, however, do, in fact, send their original art to the label, who then make the transparency before shipping the art back to the artist.

It’s the latter option which lead to the Pierced From Within cover art being printed in the wrong color for twenty-five years. Artist Hiro Takahashi sent his original painting to Roadrunner Records… but according to a source close to the creation of the album, something got totally screwed up during the creation of the transparency. The colors of the original piece were changed drastically, and for whatever reason, no one at the label spotted the error until the completed CDs had already been pressed, at which point it was too late to do anything about it.

Here’s Takahashi’s original painting…

…and here’s the Pierced From Within cover as we all know it:

Interestingly, there are Pierced From Within shirts on the market that get the color scheme correct. Presumably, these were made using Takahasi’s original painting.

Will there ever be a reissue of Pierced with the original cover? This being such a momentous anniversary for the album, it seems like now would be a great time to put one out, doesn’t it?