[Updates below original post]

Since last Monday, Oakland post-hardcore supergroup (I’ll label them that and you should too) Less Art have only been posting solitary blocks of images to their Instagram account. At first the entries seemed out of context, but as the days wore on it became evident that they were teasing what appears to be their debut album’s cover artwork, adding only the hashtag “#STRANGLEDLIGHT” for each caption as a purse-lipped clue for what they might be revealing.

Now, ten days later, the ninth and final square has been posted. So unless we have a red herring on our hands, this is presumably what Less Art’s first official album will look like (minus the thin white grid lines, of course):

I really like the textures and am curious about the placement and purpose of the negative rectangular space. What do you think?

[Update: 5/26] So that is indeed the artwork for Less Art’s debut album, Strangled Light, which is due out July 28th on Gilead Media. (A fun fact that I forgot to mention previously is that the artist behind Strangled Light is Jacob van Loon, who did the artwork for Explosion in the Sky’s The Wilderness.) And to keep piling on the radness, Less Art has unveiled their first single, “Pessimism as Denial,” and announced a few tour dates to coincide with the album’s release. You can read the exclusive write-up over at CLRVYNT and stream the track below!