Andy Vella: How I designed the paintings for Songs of a Misplaced World

When Robert Smith first talked about this album to me – three, 4, 5 years in the past, even longer – I used to be very eager to work on it as a result of I felt that it might be a fantastic one because it had clearly been brewing for some time and was going to be a response to plenty of stuff occurring on the planet. Over time, Robert and I’ve collaborated on many covers, beginning with Charlotte Typically (1981). Nonetheless, we began working extra carefully and collaboratively after I launched my e book, Obscure, in 2014.

I began placing collectively some visuals primarily based on my assumptions about what the music was going to be and sound like. Having labored with the band for over 40 years, together with on the vast majority of their albums, I can begin visualising and creating imagery with out even listening to the music.

Typography and brand

I’ve at all times created a brand new brand for every album. The brand is designed to correspond with the paintings and reply to the music, so the logos have ended up representing and punctuating the completely different defining moments within the band’s profession. It is fairly wonderful in hindsight that the logos are related to the sound of every particular person album.

The band brand for Songs of a Misplaced World goes again to the sell-out tour in 2022, Exhibits of a Misplaced World. I might designed all of the merchandise for this, along with a brand new Treatment brand, which was very playful, and followers jumped on and adored it. I heard some songs from the brand new album in Paris as a part of the 22 tour and designed one other Treatment brand in response to them with a customized ‘Cureation’ typeface. This brand was created from eight or so photocopies of my favorite serif fonts, and the typeface had an emotion which actually labored across the sound. It is bought a darkish sophistication about it with, once more, some playfulness within the typography, though it is hanging onto a slight classicism, too. Robert and I felt that this was proper for the brand new album.

Album and singles visuals

As soon as I’ve the brand, I’ll begin eager about making use of it to Robert’s idea and decoding it into the album cowl visuals. The idea he mentioned was utilizing Bagatelle, a sculpture by the Slovenian artist Janez Pirnat. My interpretation of that was to show it right into a strong factor, and I pictured it floating in area, virtually as a distant relic from a forgotten time, a buoyant pressure resisting any sort of gravity. We had the picture of this head and needed to take it some place else.

I bought collectively and collaborated with Ben Parker, a colleague who teaches with me at AUB Arts College Bournemouth in graphic design, a grasp of the shifting picture. We remodeled the Bagatelle sculpture into numerous types to show it into the item floating in area I had imagined. This appeared like a fantastic alternative to convey the album to life and characterize the lyrical content material of the songs. 3D mapping Bagatelle and animating it digitally, we created the web site and, most significantly, realised how properly this transferred into the out-of-house teaser campaigns and fed into the lyric movies the place we collaborated with Robert. These have been launched on YouTube to accompany the only releases, with up to now over 1.7 million views and counting.

Marketing campaign

The teaser marketing campaign for the out-of-house promoting is mapped around the globe, from Argentina to New York to Madrid to Blackpool and Paris. It began with a postcard for the album Songs of a Misplaced World that was blind-embossed with Roman numerals indicating the discharge date, 01.11.2024. Solely the S, O, L, and W have been blind-embossed; the remaining letters are UV and might solely be learn in UV gentle.

This postcard went viral, with folks making an attempt to guess what was occurring. We additionally put up a typographic poster, with white sort on black, exterior a pub known as The Rocket in Crawley (now referred to as The Railway), the place The Treatment performed their first gig. It was bonkers. Inside per week of the poster going up, somebody had smashed the glass cupboard that contained the poster to nick it! So you might say that this went viral, too.

We additionally projected anamorphic movies of a spinning head sculpture with the phrases Songs of the Misplaced World onto Blackpool Tower all through October as a part of the teaser marketing campaign – as Blackpool is the place Robert was born. These have been additionally worldwide. On the identical time, we have seen road posters, billboards, and listening posts in numerous file shops throughout the US. Opulent pop-art posters of the Bagatelle head have been popping up all over the place.

We have additionally created a number of codecs of the album paintings—in addition to digital releases: marble vinyl, utilising bio-vinyl, reverse-board print, deluxe CD packaging, particular limited-edition glow-in-the-dark picture-disc thermographic photographs of the top which are revealed when heated… all in all, we have created eight completely different variations of the paintings, together with a double-cassette limited-edition format. That is all printed in black and white, hoping to minimise our affect as a lot as attainable on the Earth’s sources, along with an accompanying eco merchandise vary.

Reflections on paintings and album

The brand new album is The Treatment at their basic finest. It is bought an incredible darkness, presenting a graphic actuality that describes the place we at the moment are as a human species. Musically, it’s extremely highly effective and transports you to a really stark place. The visuals are a designed response to this melancholic sound, decoding the desolation by portraying a sort of demise masks from a forgotten world, a distant time – which in flip turns into a shimmering star for everybody to face and watch and replicate on from afar.

The shifting factor about this album cowl is that it embodies a darkness that the band have at all times had. But, it is moved into a unique look, with the quilt virtually illustrating and embodying the sound and feelings of the album, which has undoubtedly resonated vastly with individuals who’ve heard it. The response to it has been unbelievable; folks completely find it irresistible, saying that it represents and works with the music in probably the most affecting and beguiling method. The album’s happening as basic Treatment – not solely does it sound like basic Treatment, however folks have commented that it appears like basic Treatment, too, which is just immense.