Shout at the Devil

The composition of the original front is an exercise in withholding. A matte black background swallows nearly the entire frame, broken only by red typography at the top and bottom edges and, between them, the pentagram itself. The lettering is kept deliberately understated so that nothing competes for attention, letting the symbol speak louder than words. The eye, given no figure and no scene to land on, is forced inward to the star.

The technique is what makes it read. Levine used studio lighting and a glossy embossed relief against the matte surface so the pentagram appears to float above the black rather than sit printed on it. Matte and gloss do the work color usually does: the pentagram is not a different hue so much as a different texture, catching light where everything around it drinks it. The dramatic contrast of black ground, red text, and reflective star is the entire palette, austere and legible from across a room.

The replacement front reorganizes the same instincts into portraiture. Four square photographs sit in a grid inside heavy black borders, each band member shot individually against smoky orange flame. The red logo still crowns the top and the title still anchors the bottom, preserving the color scheme, but now the members carry the meaning: teased and towering hair, heavy eye makeup and painted faces, studded leather and metal-collar attire. One figure snarls open-mouthed toward the camera, others glare flatly outward, and the grid stacks four separate confrontations into one wall of aggression. The flame behind them supplies the heat the matte black had only implied, literalizing the album's title where the pentagram had suggested it.

Read together, the two treatments show a single idea approached two ways. The pentagram version is pure suggestion: a symbol loaded with connotation, hidden in plain sight, demanding the viewer physically tilt the object to make it appear, which turns looking into a small act of complicity. The four-square version relocates the danger into the bodies themselves, trading the abstract emblem for glammed-up theatrics, the corpse-white makeup and tough posturing that formed glam metal's visual language. Both refuse warmth, both work in high contrast, and both let a minimum of elements do maximum work. The genius of the first is that it makes darkness into an image; the genius of the second is that it makes four faces read as one threat.

Shout at the Devil was Mötley Crüe's second album, released on September 23, 1983 through Elektra. Barry Levine handled the cover and gatefold photography and is also credited with the cover concept, while Bob Defrin was credited with the album cover design, translating Levine's photographic vision into the finished package. The band is described as heavy metal and glam metal.

The pentagram was not a marketing invention. Bassist Nikki Sixx carried the occult symbol over from Sister, a theatrical late-1970s band he had performed in alongside future W.A.S.P. vocalist Blackie Lawless, whose act fused occult imagery with blood and facial makeup. Sixx asked Lawless for permission to use Sister's occult imagery and received it, as Lawless wanted to move in a different direction. The symbol tied directly to the title: in a 1984 television interview Sixx held up the cover and explained that the title reads "at the devil," not "with the devil," which is why they placed the pentagram on the front. The album had originally been intended as "Shout With the Devil," but Elektra objected to the endorsement it implied and the title was changed to "Shout at the Devil."

Levine's studio sessions produced the gatefold interior as well as the exterior, capturing the band in full theatrical makeup and leather. Those interior portraits were shot for the fold-out format but would later be repurposed for the cover itself. Levine's involvement extended past still photography into video: he served as video concept designer and choreographer for the band's early MTV appearances, and his work on the "Looks That Kill" clip, shot over eighteen hours at A&M Records' main soundstage, helped set the visual template for hair metal on the channel.

The pentagram provoked immediate backlash. Christian and conservative groups accused the band of encouraging Satan worship, and the album's title and the pentagram were folded into ABC's 20/20 report "The Devil Worshipers" in 1985. Parents objected to finding the symbol in their children's collections. Under pressure, later pressings replaced the pentagram with individual photographs of the four members, the same portraits taken for the gatefold, a move that kept the rebellious look while easing the criticism. Some club edition versions were issued without the pentagram entirely. Levine later described the cover as purely theatrical, meant to court controversy rather than promote actual devil worship.

The controversy did not slow the sales. Shout at the Devil was the band's breakthrough, moving 200,000 copies in its first two weeks and peaking at No. 17 on the Billboard chart. Critics were less kind than buyers: Rolling Stone's J.D. Considine gave it two stars in a February 1984 review, and Robert Christgau of The Village Voice also panned it.

Beyond the album itself, the cover fed into the wider battle over explicit imagery, contributing to the climate that produced the PMRC and shifting how record labels weighed controversial artwork. As shorthand for Sunset Strip metal's confrontational look, its stark design influenced album art through the 1980s and marked Levine as one of the genre's most provocative visual architects.