Album cover trends - Power lines & lamp posts

While adding thousands of releases to the site every year, I notice patterns and trends in album covers. Most of them are completely unsurprising when taking the style of music into account, but others have me shaking my head and wondering what I'm missing. Case in point... blackgaze / post-metal albums featuring power lines and lamp posts.

 The power lines trend seems to have really kicked off with Sadness' I Want to Be There...

...but it's possible that Altar of Plagues' White Tomb played a role.

I note that many subsequent examples contain similar fluorescent colours, and the covers often have no logo or title, which makes me think that the Sadness album played the bigger role.

Regardless, it now seems to be a thing, and I have to wonder how it came to be. Is it a statement related to technology or communication, or do power lines give a select group of metal fans a feeling of melancholy or perhaps euphoria. Maybe it has to do with isolation, given that power poles are often the only sign of humanity for long stretches of countryside. I'm not sure, but here are some more examples...

As for lamp posts, I can also draw a line straight back to Sadness' Tortuga album...

Here are some other examples that I've quickly been able to find, but there are no doubt many more.

Am I alone in finding these trends somewhat strange? Lamp posts and power lines, not to mention bright fluro colours, don't exactly inspire me to check out music. The lack of logos or other discernible features make for unmemorable and boring covers too, so I'm struggling to understand it.

That is kind of a strange trend going on in some metal genres. It's like, take a photo of countryside with power lines and at least at one lamp post, add fluro color effects, and BOOM, you have an album cover. One less common theory might be that the band members don't have enough money in their budget to hire a professional photographer or artist to make artwork and, in the current decade, don't wanna have to resort to AI. This trend also seems to spread beyond blackgaze/post-metal, before Deafheaven caused blackgaze to erupt in popularity. One example being Katatonia's Dead End Kings, which I wouldn't consider too strange because it's an artwork made by the talented graphic artist Travis Smith, and his works often have diversity and experimentation:

I can't comment on why artists use such images, only on what the images say to me. In terms of the power lines thing, I get a sense of connection as what I am seeing (even though I actively avoid gaze, where this appears to predominantly be the home of the trend).  Equally though, the pagan in me could also interpret them as mans intrusion on the landscape, in some of the more open landscape photos at least. I find this concept of being able to trace trends of album work via the Academy an interesting one that I hadn't thought of before.

Some of the lamp post ones remind me of the Exorcist as well.

Blood Abscission went with this power node/aerial theme for their latest atmo-black release:

The other one that immediately came to mind was Altarage with their droney effort, Sol Corrupto:

I guess these images invoke some sense of minimalism, but like Ben they would not be images to raw me towards the music necessarily.  Yet I do enjoy some of the Kowloon Walled City album covers that deploy both minimalism and also this sense of bursts of light:

I can't comment on why artists use such images, only on what the images say to me. In terms of the power lines thing, I get a sense of connection as what I am seeing (even though I actively avoid gaze, where this appears to predominantly be the home of the trend).  Equally though, the pagan in me could also interpret them as mans intrusion on the landscape, in some of the more open landscape photos at least. 

A few years back I had a bit of a flirtation with photography with trees and woodlands being my favourite subject. One of my particular favourite photos from then is of a thick woodland with a set of powerlines running through it and it appealed to me for exactly the reason Vinny states above, the intrusion of man on the natural world. Now I don't know why these bands use these images, but seeing as a lot of the -gazey. post-metal bands are environmentally conscious, it is a distinct possibility.

For the interest of any aspiring, environmentally-conscious blackgaze act out there looking for a cheap album cover, here is that photo:

Good photo, Sonny! That can also double as a potential Spotify blackgaze playlist image.