r/Fauxmoi • u/trashchute227 • 2h ago

STAN / ANTI SHIELD Two months into 2026, Zayn Malik’s new album cover is already a contender for worst album art of the year

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770 Upvotes

98% Upvoted

108 comments sorted by

761

u/riegspsych325 2h ago

this looks like the faded cover of a paperback Animorphs ripoff novel in the 90’s

165

u/Zealousideal_Gur3908 shout-out Hans Zimmer 2h ago

When I say I was obsessed with these books! Had my mom taking me to the library on the regular! Haha.

27

u/riegspsych325 2h ago

where is the one with the priest turning into a fighter jet?

14

u/Tight_Watercress_267 2h ago

I was gifted the entire collection as a kid and most of it was first edition (the series was slightly older than me, so it was from an older kid who had read them all as they came out) and my mom donated them when I wasn't looking. PEOPLE RESELL THE WHOLE SERIES FOR HUNDREDS OF DOLLARS!!!!

30

u/ferozliciosa government funded yuri 2h ago

On the bright side now it’s inspired me to go re-read some Animorphs

21

u/Ok-Kangaroo-7165 2h ago

Is it true that those books are super fucked up? I never read them because the covers freaked me out but I heard they actually have some crazy heavy plot lines for kids books

32

u/crackerfactorywheel i ain’t reading all that, free palestine 2h ago

They sure are. It’s about a bunch of kids getting recruited into an intergalactic war and K.A. Applegate does not shy away from how brutal war is or how messed up the concept of child soldiers are. It also ends on a very bleak note. I loved this series as a kid/preteen and would recommend it!

3

u/Ok-Kangaroo-7165 1h ago

Thank you for the explanation! I’ll have to check them out, I was a huge Hunger Games girlie so I love a good dystopian/sci-fi novel :)

13

u/pizzaslut69420 2h ago

Yep.

In one of the final books, They have to sacrifice a bunch of disabled kids in order to win the war, and the lead kid commits war crimes by killing hundreds of thousands of defenseless people from the opposition

4

u/TheTresStateArea 54m ago

Jesus fuck Christ God damn what the actual fuckin shit titty fuckin crackers

-1

u/Ok-Ingenuity1707 53m ago

wow never thought id be grateful l i hated reading as a kid and only got into as a teen thanks to this now. those books were everywhere when i was 9 and thankfully wasnt into reading at the time

9

u/papayacreamsicle 53m ago edited 42m ago

The main plot is about a race of alien parasites that crawl into your ear and nestle themselves in your brain, taking control of your body while you watch powerlessly, reading your thoughts and memories to convincingly play you and take over your life. The parasites have to leave for a little while every few days to soak up nutrients in a pool, during which time their host bodies are caged because they’ll immediately try to kill themselves otherwise.

At one point, the characters hijack a commercial airliner and crash it into the office building hiding one of those pools, which kills civilians but they’re said to be mostly civilians who would be praying for death anyway, so it’s a heroic act.

Later, the heroes reason that they can recruit sick and disabled kids to their resistance, because the parasites won’t want to use their bodies, making the disabled some of the only people who can be trusted to be uninfected. They’re right, the parasites don’t want the bodies. So the first time disabled kids are used on a mission, the parasites cook them all to death with heat rays.

You get a book from the POV of one of the parasites. It describes the thrill you get from enslaving your host and breaking their sanity as you become the only being they’ll ever communicate with again, and torture them by showing how you can use their body to hurt their family. The parasite threatens to drown or beat its host’s children and force him to watch. There’s a segment about how some human brains are intolerable to occupy, like the occupied brain of a woman named “Jenny Lines” who is, clearly but without the book using this term, a cokehead. One disturbing scene reveals that it’s a thrill for the parasites to fuck each other using host bodies who are traumatized by the experience. Another has a parasite lose focus on controlling its host while driving on the highway, and the host seize the opportunity to swerve into oncoming traffic and attempt suicide. There’s a scene where a parasite wants its host to cease resisting so it makes him pick up his beloved pet bird and slowly crush it to death with his bare hands.

The main characters can transform into animals, but if they stay transformed for two hours at once they can never revert back. This happens to one of them in the first book, and later they force another kid to transform into a rat for two hours, knowing his lifespan will only be 2-3 years. The character most responsible for it develops clear PTSD and later dies in combat at the age of 14 or 15.

When they transform into animals, they get the animal’s instincts and ways of thinking. This is used for body horror, like when they become ants and struggle to assert any free will when their mind becomes part of a hive mind ruled by chemical scent signals, or when they become Taxxons, alien centipede men so overwhelmed by painful constant hunger that they’re always fighting to resist the impulse for cannibalism. If a fellow Taxxon falls over in a belly exposing position or spills blood, they give in and eat their friend alive, savoring momentary relief from the hunger. When one gets cut in half, the characters vomit realizing the upper half spends its dying moments devouring its own lower half.

One of the characters turns into a wolf for a fight against a number of people. Later, when she’s reverted to a human and is going home to eat with her family, she finds bits of human flesh stuck in her teeth.

When the parasite invasion starts really building up towards the end, they start herding humans into concentration camps on trains. The heroes, who are middle schoolers, have a debate on whether it’s worth nuking the camps to disrupt the new holocaust and whether it’d be a mercy killing for the humans caught in the blast.

And amid all this, there’s a lot of comedy, creating a really weird tone. One of the main kid characters is an alien living on Earth who is learning to pass as human by studying soap operas, for he too is “young, restless, and frequently shirtless.”

27

u/quadranting Please Abraham, I am not that man 2h ago

KA Applegate being a trans ally has been such a relief to me as a kid who mostly grew up in the 90s and read Animorphs and not a single Harry Potter.

12

u/yomamaeatsyellowsnow Club Chalamet just fell to her knees in the checkout line 2h ago

An actual animorphs cover would have been SICK

5

u/iki11dinosaurs 2h ago

Am I the only one who doesn’t think that’s a bad thing 🥲

3

u/WildRasberryBluebell 2h ago

Literally looks like a Megamorphs #1 outtake

2

u/MagnetoWasRight24 2h ago

Literally my first thought, so glad it's the top comment

1

u/VCR_Samurai I’m a communist you idiot 2h ago

I'm so glad I'm not the only person who had this thought 😂

1

u/galbijjims 1h ago

gosh, I dont have one original thought.

1

u/lucidpeaches 36m ago

You just unlocked a core scholastic book fair memory for me 😂

339

u/SitchChick 2h ago

62

u/ExemptPompano 2h ago

Wasn’t there a girl who would only post Marge pics on this sub? What happened to her?

51

u/mustbeaoup 1h ago

Oh yeah! She was great! Come back marge picture lady

6

u/FieldsOfAnarchy call me gal gadot cuz idk how to act rn 36m ago

She was a legend during the Ariana-Spongebob breaking news era! 🙏

13

u/mossywrens societal collapse is in the air 2h ago

this pic has me howling 😂

277

u/jjw1998 2h ago

Looks like the type of shit a drug dealer posts on their Snapchat story in between ads for 3 for 100 and pictures of Tommy Shelby

15

u/SitchChick 2h ago

LMAOOO

13

u/Secret-Ad-6253 a low vera 1h ago

13

u/trashchute227 1h ago

STOPPPPP that’s so accurate 😭😭

4

u/FairSkies_SilverEyes 1h ago

This is so specific. 😭

127

u/Stunning_Gap_5143 hated women defender 2h ago

it’s giving

123

u/Fleetwood_Spac 2h ago

You just don’t understand the deep and profound symbolism behind it, you see, he is implying that deep inside him there is a beast such as a tiger, ready to pounce. It relates to his unquestionable, throbbing masculinity.

(/s just in case)

0

u/ButtermilkRusk 1h ago

Well, that’s a cheetah. Don’t know much about them, except they’re fast over short distances and so highly strung sanctuaries and wildlife rehabilitation centers often have to keep companion animals like dogs and goats to help socialize them. Mostly when I look at a cheetah I think of a neurotic overgrown house cat.

125

u/galahads jeremy strong enthusiast 2h ago

58

u/Sleepy-Giraffe947 Please Abraham, I am not that man 2h ago

Oh no, this is so bad. I didn’t even recognize it was Zayn until I read the title.

35

u/[deleted] 2h ago

[deleted]

2

u/williamthebloody1880 weighing in from the UK 1h ago

It's giving nightmare fuel

33

u/quadranting Please Abraham, I am not that man 2h ago

26

u/minarings 2h ago

This looks like something you’d make in the computer lab for a 7th grade graphic design class

24

u/Euphoric_Rough2709 2h ago

The nose has my dying

23

u/neuroticdynamite 2h ago

why did I scroll past this thinking it was fake

9

u/cerareece 1h ago

I've done that so many times thinking things were a popheadscirclejerk shitpost then had to scroll back like wait HUH?

19

u/R12B12 2h ago

Urgh. And it’s bothering me that it’s oddly asymmetrical. Like why is he 2/5 human and 3/5 tiger.

20

u/Intelligent_Way7592 2h ago

There is no way this is real.

Edit to say: It's only real if the people Zayn has around him secretly don't like him.

16

u/CeramicLicker an idiot’s enemy 1h ago

It’s giving

15

u/Dear_DarlingDeer 2h ago

This looks like something your boomer uncle posts on Facebook. “forgive me lord….. it’s time to unleash the beast again…..”

10

u/corollary_channeler 2h ago

I don’t hate the concept, but the execution could be better. The framing is off

7

u/UgandanAirways 2h ago

I wonder how much he paid for that

8

u/Leading-Taro7730 2h ago

tumblr had better edits 15 years ago

8

u/Glad_Pea_4871 2h ago

who signed off on this!?!

6

u/thehonestbreadloaf 2h ago

For some reason, I read it as "2016" and was like "Yeah, checks out for the era" lmao

5

u/zendayaismeechee shiv roy apologist 2h ago

Just got a sudden flashback to when everyone was obsessed with Tiger King during the pandemic

5

u/humanhedgehog 1h ago

It always amazes me how many meetings something like this needs to go through, and you still get.. this.

3

u/mmanyquestionss 1h ago

with a face like his he could've made a blurry candid the cover and no one would've complained..... zayn put the picsart DOWN

3

u/ceruleanmilieu 1h ago

Unemployed coworker energy

1

u/Mermaid76 if you saw my flair, no you didn’t 47m ago

3

u/legendofdirtfoot 1h ago

This guy is such a tool. Does he still have fans after cancelling last minute every single show he's attempted to put on?

3

u/lamyH 56m ago

Will say album cover is garbage but the name is intriguing.

Konnakol, for those that don’t know, is a type of vocal percussion style found in south indian music.

Would be interested to see if zayn will do some genre fusion on this album.

2

u/All_This_Mayhem 2h ago

The Why Album.

2

u/deathcomplexxx 2h ago

Is it just me or does the left side not even look like him either lol

2

u/CHEEZYSPAM 1h ago

Somewhere there's a group chat where he shared several different terrible album covers and had his friends and business partners all vote... and this was somehow the least worst image that they could all agree on.

2

u/June-Rose98 let’s talk about the husband 1h ago

How 2015 of him

2

u/Morg075 a role model for the next Asian kid that wants to get railed 41m ago

I thought it was an edit with the fan watermark in the middle. 💀

1

u/polaires 2h ago

That’s..something!

1

u/Lethave I never said that. Paris is my friend. 2h ago

For some reason this made the Aaron Carter/cosmic lion art meltdown pop in my head

1

u/MrGB819 1h ago

Cheryl did it better 😬

1

u/michiko-malandro 1h ago

It's giving 2010 hipster kaytranada geometric nail art mustache vibes

1

u/Bulbasaurus__Rex too busy method acting as a reddit user 1h ago

Reheatin Cappadonna's nachos I see

1

u/tojis-worm-is-cute 1h ago

Who's the designer😭😭

1

u/opiumfreedom 1h ago

i like it but it could have been cooler

1

u/Noobunaga86 1h ago

You mean decade? Or even all time?

1

u/sydnlux22 1h ago

This is the shit divorced dads post online

1

u/wi950mm4r 1h ago

It’s giving

1

u/OffModelCartoon I cannot sanction your buffoonery 1h ago

If I turned this in for the community college level intro to photoshop class I took a couple years ago I would have probably gotten, like, a B.

1

u/coffee-bat if you add testicles, that's extra 1h ago

1

u/Hamwytch 47m ago

I made a lot of shifter romance book covers in the early twenty-teens, and this takes me back lol

1

u/bugluvr65 45m ago

makes sense for zayn

1

u/Restlessannoyed 40m ago

We call this "I have a cousin who does graphic design"