Sqwink Album Art Blog

R.E.M’s new single, Supernatural Superserious, is taken from their 14th studio album, Accelerate—which incidentally has great album art. However, the sleeve for the first single to be plucked from the album is rather uninspiring (see below).

Firstly, I don’t know what it actually is - apart from the typography, obviously. Secondly, with the Accelerate being so good (look out for my future posts)…why is this a shambles?
To give this piece of album art 4/10 is a gift. It’s not totally rubbish, but being a sleeve for R.E.M—it could have been so much better. It may be supernatural, it may be Superserious…but it’s definitely not Sleevealicious!

I’m used to hearing a new Hot Chip track—and then at some point discovering the album artwork which represents it. These CD covers, such as Hot Chip’s The Warning, Colours and Over and Over are both bright and colorful. These covers are what I’m used to seeing—and what I imagine their work would look like in future releases.

Now, with the release of Hot Chip’s new album Made in the Dark, these connotations of what the cover-style is expected to be like are blown away (see above).

In a nutshell, I think this album artwork is both bland and dull—but still quite imaginative in a very niched-sort-of-way. Don’t get me wrong, just because Hot Chips’ previous albums have been colorful doesn’t mean they have to stick to that style forever, I just think that in this case, they should’ve done.

Overall, the real question is—Does this album art represent Hot Chip’s music and style…well yes. It may be bland and may be boring, but it is different, it is unique and is recognizable as a Hot Chip CD cover. At the end of the day, that is what sleeve’s are all about—selling the music.

So has the designer put a lot of thought into this design? Yes. Could it have been better? Yes. Was it made in the dark? Er, you tell me!

I can remember the last couple of albums that I designed, where one place where accuracy is paramount is placing text and logos in the CD spine.

You literally have less than 1cm to squeeze all the elements into this thin strip of CD ‘real estate’—the dreaded spine of the album’s artwork. As any good designer will tell you—if there’s ever a place to concentrate your efforts whilst designing a band’s album, it’s here.

Well, as 80% of all music is now purchased online, this small segment of album artwork is seldom seen in the online world. Artists and bands alike often release two versions of their CD art—a booklet for the physical world and a digital-booklet for online use.

The production of physical albums is by no means dead (and neither should it be), but as time goes on, and more artists choose just to release digital versions of their music—album artwork may no longer have any backbone.