Ancient Mars album cover UNCROPPED. HAS TO BE SEEN TO BE BELIEVED PPL ARE SHOOK

UNLOCKABLE CONTENT: the uncropped ur-image of your favourite apocalyptic indie album circa 2012. Read below...

I took this photo with my iPhone 3GS sometime in 2011 after playing a 3-day ultimate tournament in brand new cleats. My toenail was dying and the crazy colours must have been its way of saying "good luck in your endeavours". A month-ish later I met our album art designer Andrew Huciliak at a coffee shop to go through ideas for the cover. I wanted something that felt like a martian landscape. Beautiful and hostile, maybe a little hopeful? Everything we could find was a little too on-the-nose so we were rifling through my laptop and I showed him this toe photo as a laugh. We zoomed in and let the colours wash over us. We had our landscape. Some time was spent cropping it so there's just enough cuticle that once you see it you can't unsee it. I'd mentioned this fact before but i think nobody believed me until last night it caught on on instagram. People are shook. Some ppl are weird about feet (on both sides of the love/ick spectrum) and suddenly their favourite album isn't what they thought it was. It shouldn't make them love it less. To me it adds a very human dimension. It's a bruise, and metaphorically that's a lot of what Ancient Mars is about. Things change, love ends and leaves a bruise and only when the bruise fades do you realize you miss the bruise too because it was the last trace of that beautiful time you can never return to.-Zg