...I haven't even talked to the guys about this, what this album sounds like. I've been sitting here trying to think about what to say. The best thing I can come up with is that it's kinda like a mixture between the first and second album but it's the heaviest thing we've ever done. It's really fucking brutal man and I hope people like it. I think they're gonna be surprised when they hear it because it does have a little different tone to it.
Chris Barnes / Cannibal Corpse interview, Sounds of Death #2, 1993
...The slow parts are powerful and the fast parts are like a hundred times faster. There's some different things in there too. The guitar sound turned out fucking incredible and its got a really rich bass sound. We're really happy with it.
CANNIBAL CORPSE released their third album, Tomb of the Mutilated, on this day in 1992 through Metal Blade. As with the previous albums it was recorded with Scott Burns at Morrisound in Tampa, Florida.
We went in there knowing basically what we wanted to accomplish this time around. We had a good idea what to expect. We had been there two times already and we feel real comfortable there so it's like we knew what Scott [Burns] had in mind. We had a few ideas as far as the guitar and bass sound so it turned out really well.
Chris Barnes / Cannibal Corpse interview, Sounds of Death #2, 1993
...when I first started writing the lyrics it was definitely sexual. Sex that's basically what this album's about. I like to think of it as psychotic eroticism. It's got a weird sound to it with the lyrics. It's psycho-pornographic if there is such a term.
Chris Barnes / Cannibal Corpse interview, Sounds of Death #2, 1993
...I always have the music on tape before I start to write the lyrics, and I'll get an idea in my head, just a story that I'm thinking of. Put it this way man, it would be impossible for me to write something lyrically tame. It would be more difficult for me to do something like that than to sit down and think to myself, how am I gonna write a song? What am I gonna write about? It always just comes out naturally explicit because I think about that stuff probably 24 hours a day.
...I think one of the earliest things that set me up was probably sitting down on Sunday afternoons with my father and watching Vincent Price movies on T.V. Edgar Allan Poe stories and shit like that. When I first got into music it was like Kiss back in 1975. From there it was Van Halen and whatever. I just like music ever since I saw Gene Simmons fucking spit up blood. That's when I knew I wanted to do this.
With long time collaborator Vincent Locke, the band prepared two versions of the cover artwork.
That was my idea. I kinda took it off the old Dead World situation with Dead World Comics, where Vincent Locke does all our album covers... what they used to do, every month a new issue would come out, they would use two different covers for the comic book, one explicit, and on 'clean' version. That's what we did. I told Vincent, "What do you think about doing two album covers?" and he was all into it and thought it was a great idea. So we got one over-the-top album cover, and the other cover which is killer artwork, it's even a little more evil, more subliminally evil. We offered that to the stores. Whichever album cover the store wants to get, get both covers, that's cool. So no one loses out on artwork.
Chris Barnes / Cannibal Corpse interview, Thrashikus #5, 1992
The tame cover takes place a few moments before the other scene. It's basically like the one zombie is over the top of the coffin. The woman's arms are reaching out of the coffin. There's a lot of skulls hanging in the background. It's evil looking. It's not bloody or anything, but it's really cool. That's not gonna out until we have some controversy. I don't know if we're gonna hear anything.
Chris Barnes / Cannibal Corpse interview, Sounds of Death #2, 1993