Pestilence will release its new album Hadeon in March 2018 and recently unveiled the cover art alongside the album title and information. The artwork was done by Santiago Francisco Jaramillo, who operates under the moniker Triple Seis Designs, and upon its unveiling, the blog Sad But True: Plagiarism in Heavy Metal Art immediately called bullshit. Sad But True is a blog that exposes artists who feel like it's okay to plagiarize artwork from other artists, and called out Jaramillo on exactly that.
Here's where Sad But True says the artwork was plagiarized via a comparison image.
The post was published on October 23 on Sad But True, and a few days later Pestilence caught wind of the situation and canceled the artwork completely. Pestilence says both itself and Hammerheart Records were not aware that the artwork was stolen, absolutely condemn the artist for doing so, and have retracted any and all endorsements of Triple Seis Designs and Santiago Francisco Jaramillo.
Here's the full statement by both the band and the label.
Cover artwork for Pestilence (official)'s "Hadeon" cancelled
Last week we proudly presented the artwork for "Hadeon", the new album by legendary Death Metal band Pestilence. This, in itself, fantastic artwork was created by Triple Seis, a company specialized in artwork for Metal bands (they did many artwork related things before we contacted them) based in Ecuador. In the past months Patrick Mameli shared his thoughts on what "Hadeon" needed to look like when put into art, and Triple Seis created it. Hammerheart Records made a contract and paid a pretty decent amount of money to become the owner of this artwork, so we could use it for all releases and products we wanted to use it on/for. We were very pleased on how this turned out…
Then… Upon its publication we started to receive messages that several parts of this artwork were stolen and copied into this design. The messages were not merely rumours, but they were true! We were shocked when we were shown how obviously and without shame this was done, we were left in disbelief. Both Hammerheart Records and Pestilence had never experienced anything like this before, and we find it totally objectionable.
We hereby declare that we have to cancel this artwork, we sincerely apologize to all the people/companies whose artwork was used without permission. We did not know this and we would never ever support this. We like to make it 100% clear that we do not support any of these “work” ethics done by Triple Seis and have returned the artwork to them in full and we will remove all announcements and links related to this artwork to the best of our abilities. Needless to say that this effects our hard work, we are not finished yet for a release of "Hadeon". We need to switch to solving this problem.
"Hadeon" will see the light of day, the release date is still March 2018. We will not give in and continue our journey to World Domination in 2018. We find great consolation in the support of the Pestilence legions supporting us worldwide, thanks a lot!
As soon as we have the new artwork to show we will make an announcement.
Patrick Mameli, Pestilence
Guido Heijnens, management Pestilence, Hammerheart Records
So if you or your band are thinking about using Triple Seis Designs, maybe think about using someone else.
