News: Fear Not’s ‘Weight of the World’ – A New Era of Muscle, Metal, and Machine
By Seth Metoyer, Heaven’s Metal Magazine,
Fear Not isn’t messing around.
Three decades after they first emerged with a gritty, gutsy take on hard rock, the band returns in 2025 with Weight of the World, and if it’s as sick as the art looks, then we’re in for a real treat. Designed by the ever-prolific Scott Waters, the album cover is a full-on visual sermon, part digital fresco, part prophetic vision of survival in a crumbling world.
The cover grabs you like a comic book panel inked by the ghost of Frazetta and digitally resurrected through the tools of tomorrow. We see a lone, hyper-muscular figure, chained and kneeling in what looks like the post-collapse ruins of a once-bustling metropolis. Behind him are shattered skyscrapers silhouetted against a foreboding sky, a visual metaphor for cultural decay if ever there was one. The color grading leans cinematic, almost like a dystopian Blade Runner baptism, steel blues, sulfur yellows, with shadows deep enough to swallow hope but not quite extinguish it.
What makes this cover especially compelling is what you don’t immediately see: the technological scaffolding behind it. Waters, best known for his traditional metal design work, has started dipping his brush into machine learning, specifically using AI to generate the figure at the center of the piece.
“I couldn’t find the right image in Adobe Stock and didn’t have a model to photograph,” Waters wrote on Facebook. “So I tried my hand at AI. I then colored the image in Photoshop adding in the yellow and blue reflections in the skin, the muted skin tones and the dark shadows.“
This was his first real foray into blending his own art with AI-generated elements, and the result is a cover that doesn’t just depict burden, it feels like it understands it. The AI-generated figure began in black and white, sculpted through algorithms, but brought to vivid, bruised life by Waters’ human touch. The soul of the piece comes not from the tool, but from the artist who wields it.
What’s fascinating here isn’t just the aesthetic, it’s the attitude. Fear Not isn’t just pushing weight sonically; they’re leaning into a modern era where even sacred things like album art are evolving. This isn’t surrender to technology. This is a collaboration. A fusion. Maybe even a reckoning.
Thematically, it fits the album’s title. Weight of the World is, at its core, a document of struggle, perseverance, and hope through the wreckage, spiritual and societal. The man on the cover could be Samson. He could be Job. He could be you after trying to carry everything life’s thrown at you. And now, in a twist of poetic irony, he’s also a composite of human emotion and machine logic. That fusion mirrors the record itself: heavy, grounded, but striving for the divine.
Waters’ background elements, the clouds he photographed himself, the crumbling buildings shaped by custom Photoshop brushes, show that his work is still rooted in his own fingerprints. That’s where art and innovation collide like thunder.
Be on the lookout for Fear Not’s Weight of the World, coming soon from Roxx Records.
About Author
