Nader Sadek is a visual artist whose current project is a heavy metal album about the world’s oil dependency problems. The Cairo-born, New York-based artist made a name for himself in the metal underground with installations and masks for Norwegian black metal band Mayhem and experimental droners Sunn O))). Sadek’s own visual art increasingly uses metal as a reference point, so maybe it was only a matter of time before he put out an album himself.

Though Sadek wrote many of the songs on his album, In the Flesh, he doesn’t consider himself a musician. But the music, thankfully, hasn’t been neglected. For In the Flesh, Sadek collaborated with some of extreme metal’s finest practitioners: guitarist Rune Ericksen of Mayhem, vocalist Steve Tucker (formerly of Morbid Angel), drummer Flo Mounier of Cryptopsy, and an unholy host of guests.

Sadek is fascinated by the cycle of destruction created when human beings exhume crude oil — made of long-dead things — and then use it to hasten our own deaths by polluting the environment and fighting over it. The album’s narrative as well as the videos and other visual elements of the project confront this state of affairs through the eyes of a resurrected warrior from ancient times. Totally. Brutal.

Image courtesy of Nader Sadek.