Dirge Within is the new metal powerhouse from Chicago featuring ex-Soil guitarist Shaun Glass. The band came to Stephen Jensen and F3 Studios to photograph the band and create the album art for their debut album Force Fed Lies set to be released September 1, 2009 on E1 Music (formerly Koch Records).

Click here or on the image above to see the cover.

Shaun Glass says: “When I first heard Jerms’ words to the song, I knew we had to make sure the album cover was mind-blowing without being typical. I knew that only Stephen Jensen could pull this amazing piece together.”

Dirge Within wanted to focus on the meaning behind the lyrics for the title track “Force Fed Lies”. The song focuses on the soldiers marched off to war, a war based on lies and misinformation. Dirge Within wanted to have the arm of a fallen soldier sticking out of the barren, war-torn ground with battle rifle still at the ready. The search was on for a rifle to photograph for the cover. Luckily, Stephen’s assistant Patrick has a close friend that is part of a local police force. Officer Efren Pelayo was kind enough to come out to the studio with his M4 rifle and model for the cover.

Stephen notes: “Before the shoot I sent a snapshot of Efren’s rifle to the band for approval to make sure that it was the kind of rifle that they wanted. They said that it looks perfect and asked if the actual rifle would look as good as this one (assuming that it was just a photo that I found on the internet). I told them that it would look exactly like that because it is the actual rifle that I’m shooting. They were very excited because they were worried that we wouldn’t be able to find a military rifle that looked real enough… I said, how about the real thing?”

“I then wanted the set to be that of a massive crater in the ground with the surrounding skyline, but I didn’t want the skyline to be a typical cityscape. Instead I made the cityscape a mixture of buildings and rock pinnacles so that it appeared like the jaws of a large beast or gears in a broken down machine.”