The record cover built rather than drawn. Mills works bone, teeth, feathers and rusted matter into the surface of a piece, then lets water and chemistry corrode it, so the artwork carries its own decay. The image is an object before it is a picture.
Why the Bureau files him. Mills is not a musician the archive files for sound; he is the hand behind the look of several records the tradition keeps close. His method is the point. Where most sleeve design arranges type and photographs, Mills assembles material, animal remains, blood, insects and found debris, onto a ground and subjects it to rot, so that fragility and decay are physically present in the work rather than depicted. That instinct, the made surface that bears its own damage, runs parallel to what the tradition does in sound, and it earns him a place in the Sleeves sub-section beside the other figures who gave the music its visual face.
He came to it through Brian Eno. While at art school in the late 1970s Mills illustrated the lyrics of Eno's vocal albums as a closing project, work later gathered into the book More Dark Than Shark (1986). Through the 1980s the commissions followed: cover work for Eno, for David Sylvian (Gone to Earth), for Japan (Exorcising Ghosts), for Harold Budd and Eno's The Pearl, the Cocteau Twins, Michael Nyman and others. The style moved away from drawing toward the embedded, corroded assemblage that became his signature.
The work the archive files him for is the one he made with Nine Inch Nails. Commissioned in 1994 to build the entire visual world of The Downward Spiral, Mills extended a single sensibility across the album cover and booklet, the singles, and the later reissues: skeletons, teeth, blood and dead insects fixed into canvas and left to decay, the surface scarred to match the record's subject. He returned for The Fragile in 1999, where the same vocabulary of damaged organic matter carried a quieter register, and again for Hesitation Marks in 2013. The covers are among the most-cited industrial-adjacent visual documents of the period, and they are filed here as design, not as illustration of someone else's music.
Mills sits in the Sleeves sub-section alongside Jon Wozencroft, the continuous visual editor of Touch, and the design partnership Hipgnosis: figures the tradition reaches for not because they made the records but because they gave them their surface. The distinction the Bureau holds is the one between the cover as packaging and the cover as object. Mills works firmly on the second side of it.