STACK #232 February 2024

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FEBRUARY THIS MONTH:

The Last Dinner Party

The Smile

Middle Kids

Looking back at the stories behind our favourite album covers, this month it’s The Marshall Mathers LP 2 (2013).

When Eminem announced his eighth album The Marshall Mathers LP 2 – to be released 13 years after its 2000 namesake, and since which the Detroit rapper had released four other albums – fans suspected the release’s art might contain a throwback to the first LP. On that album’s cover, Eminem sits on the front steps of his childhood home on Dresden Street, the sun shining across its awning. A month before LP 2 landed, the rapper revealed its art on Twitter. It was,

The 10th anniversary editions of Eminem’s The Marshall

again, the same angle of the same house in which the man had spent his formative years... yet there was no Em to be seen, the place was totally boarded up, and the street number – 19946, the real number at which Mathers lived – was spraypainted across the door. It was a hard-hitting comment on the deterioration of place, identity, and the passage of time, ideas which gained further gravity when a house fire claimed the building’s upper floor just three days after LP 2 ’s release. The album debuted at number one on the US Billboard chart, received critical acclaim, and won Eminem his sixth Grammy Award. Mathers LP 2 are out Feb 9 via IGA/Universal.

The cover art for Eminem’s The Marshall Mathers LP (2000)

22 FEBRUARY 2023

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