EMINEM DEBUTS THE ARTWORK FOR HIS NEW ALBUM RECOVERY!

On his recent chart-topping single "Not Afraid," Eminem includes one of the more shocking confessions of his career in the lyrics. "Let's be honest/ That last Relapse CD was 'eh,' " he raps during the song's second verse, admitting to the universe that his hit 2009 album Relapse was spotty at best, a sentiment shared by fans and critics alike. Slim Shady and his producers have made it clear that his hotly anticipated upcoming album Recovery will keep its distance from his previous effort, a point that's driven home by the just-unveiled album art, which Em premiered on his official Web site late Monday.
While the cover to Relapse features the man born Marshall Mathers' visage constructed of pills, the two covers for Recovery show a more reticent side of the rapper. In the first one, Eminem is walking down a desolate road. We only see his back, but the message is clear: The road to recovery (and to Recovery) is long and hard.

Just as Em's 2000 album The Marshall Mathers LP had a second cover art variation, so does Recovery. The other cover shows Eminem on a brick courtyard in some sort of futuristic-looking office park. He is encased in a glass cube and sitting on a couch reading a book in front of a giant flat-screen television. It is meant to look like some sort of performance art or observational experiment, but again, Slim is all by himself in the frame.

After ducking out of the public eye for a few months, Eminem is back to business and has quite a few projects on the horizon. In addition to Recovery (out June 22), he can be heard on the remix to B.o.B's "Airplanes" (currently making a bid to be the official song of the summer of 2010), is working on signing Slaughterhouse to his Shady Records label, and has a pair of massive concerts with Jay-Z in Detroit and New York coming up in September.