Paranoid Android has officially made its return to the custom ROM scene, and it’s brought a few new wallpapers with its newest version that are even more surreal and abstract than the Beatles-inspired art that fans may remember from the Android 4.1 Jelly Bean days. To the untrained eye, Hampus Olsson’s work may appear to be nothing more than random splashes of paint, rendered digitally by high-quality photography. A closer look shows meaning, symbolism, and beauty in the vertically-oriented wallpapers bundled with this year’s revival of Paranoid Android. In total, there are six vertical wallpapers available in 4K and 1080p resolution, along with a horizontal banner featuring Paranoid Android text, all available for download through the source link below. Being highly detailed and bearing a range of colors means that the 4K resolution versions have enormous file sizes; even the 1080p wallpapers weigh in around 2MB. Somewhat more bandwidth-friendly versions of the 1080p wallpapers are available for viewing and download in the gallery beneath this writing.
The first image in the new wallpaper batch is called “A New Beginning.” Bold splashes of orange and creamy white belie a certain sense of power and eagerness; you can practically see a beast charging headlong into the unknown. The second wallpaper is an inverted version of the first one and seems to convey a more tentative mood, like being in a new and unknown territory. Naturally, both are a good match for Paranoid Android’s newest build, marking the ROM’s entry into the Android 7.1 Nougat era.
The third wallpaper in the set, titled “Another Galaxy,” further embraces the wonders of the unknown by showing a menagerie of colors against the void of space. The fourth image, “Beasts,” seems to depict a powerful force moving over a territory and taking it over from the top down. The fifth one, “Fluffy Dream,” takes advantage of some cool visual tricks to make it look as though you could run your finger over multi-colored fabric, if you could just get past the glass over your device’s LCD panel. The final image in the set, “Mineral,” looks almost like a clean slice into a glasslike, crystallized rock.
