Similar Artist Analysis: LIL UGLY MANE

Lil Ugly Mane makes his own album covers for his music he takes inspiration from many different subcultures including metal and southern hip hop.
These covers above are inspired by pen and pixel album covers which were old skool hip hop album covers made by pen and pixel a graphic design firm in Houston, Texas USA. These are usually very gaudy with a lot of gold or diamonds or bright glowing text with lens flares. The covers often portray an artist and they either show them in a dangerous situation or a design covered with money, cars, food and drink to show wealth.
They relate to the genre because it is used for southern hip hop and the style is very often replicated by smaller, low budget, underground artists although many still use this style because of tradition. Some artists that use this style for album or mixtape covers make alternative hip hop music such as Three 6 Mafia who includes elements of horrorcore and Lil B who creates strange and wacky hip hop.

Lil Ugly Mane has very few physical releases he has only released his most popular album Mista Thug Isolation on vinyl and cassette and most recently at the end of 2015 released a boxset or 4 vinyl and 4 cassettes of his new album and some of his other material. This shows the artists carefree attitude about making the music for the money because he only released the music because fans wanted it, he also shows relation to old skool hip hop by only releasing music on old formats instead of CD.

The imagery the artist uses is very dark but still has connections to hip hop other than the pen n pixel connection. Lots of skulls, skeletons, a grave, someone crying, a noose etc. is put with some hip hop imagery such as a pile of money, a guard dog and the title of one of the albums "Mista Thug Isolation". This shows that the artist makes alternative hip hop.

For these designs, Lil Ugly Mane was inspired by black metal (which he has also made in the past). His past and interest in other genres such as black metal cement him as an alternative hip hop artist. For the actual design of these covers, they generally are very dark and usually black and white. They use imagery of ominous landscapes, goats, burned churches death and generally anything dark and evil. They usually have a gothic/medieval style especially in the font choice.
Lil Ugly Mane has used these elements in a collage style of random black and white images that may not even relate to much of the music other than to fit the mood and style.

The dark style fits the genre of alternative hip hop and  many artists in the genre make their covers in black and white to create a certain mood for the album or the musician in general or because they are inspired by black metal or related genres. Artists such as clipping. and Billy Woods are notable alternative hip hop artists who only use black and white in their covers.

Other Lil Ugly Mane covers are more experimental and abstract. The cover for On Doing An Evil Deed Blues shows dark, black and red image of a sweatshirt with the title of the track on it in a gothic font. Although the image looks dark and has text with metal connotations, the design has childish imagery such as the Mickey Mouse clothes hanger and the stripey background. The juxtaposition makes this cover very strange. The cover for Uneven Compromise has an image of an all seeing eye against a bright red background, creepy text is imposed over the top and the last cover for a remix album of Mista Thug Isolation has a creepy image of a mask on the ground although the text is relatively normal. I think this style of cover is the artists attempt at being experimental and trying to create unsettling art.