From Creative Review:
Long-time collaborator Andy Vella talks to us about working on the album artwork and campaign for the band’s first studio album in 16 years
By Megan Williams
Following a 16-year break from studio albums, The Cure’s new record Songs of a Lost World has been met with widespread acclaim and lauded as “powerful, possessed of a dark beauty and frequently moving”.
“The new album is The Cure at their classic best,” Andy Vella, graphic designer and the band’s long-time collaborator, tells CR. The result is ripe for visual exploration. “It’s got an amazing darkness, presenting a graphic reality that describes where we are now as a human species. Musically, it’s very powerful and transports you to a very stark place.”
Vella began to think about the visual approach long before he had even heard the music, initially going off the ideas he knew frontman Robert Smith would be exploring in the album. “Having worked with the band for over 40 years, and worked on the majority of the band’s albums, I can start to visualise and create imagery without even hearing the music,” he explains.
Vella creates a new band wordmark for every album, each of which has come to define the various periods in the band’s discography. For Songs of a Lost World, the logo features new custom ‘Cureation’ lettering – a distressed, tactile serif that he designed after hearing some of the new music during the band’s 2022 tour.
“It’s got a dark sophistication about it with, again, some playfulness in the typography, although it’s hanging onto a slight classicism, too,” he says. “Robert and I felt that this was right for the new album.”
He and Smith then began to interpret this visually across the rest of the album cover, which aims to channel the music’s sense of “desolation” by conjuring a bygone age. Smith brought up a 1975 sculpture by Slovenian artist Janez Pirnat called Bagatelle, which Vella pictured “floating in space, almost as a distant relic from a forgotten time; a buoyant force resisting any kind of gravity.”
The designer then worked with his Arts University Bournemouth colleague Ben Parker to bring the sculpture to life in motion across the album website and lyric videos.
Vella worked on various formats of the album artwork, from digital to cassette, as well as a limited edition version using thermographic ink, where the sculpture’s head is revealed when heated. The album’s commentary on the state of the world is echoed in the design approach, which included using bio vinyl and creating “eco merchandise”.
The visuals fed into a series of teasers, including outdoor displays in cities around the world featuring the release date and the album title’s initials (the remaining letters were only visible under UV light) and a typographic poster placed outside The Railway pub (previously The Rocket) in Crawley, where the band played their first gig. “Within a week of the poster going up, someone had smashed the glass cabinet that contained the poster to nick it!” says Vella.
There were also anamorphic displays of the Bagatelle sculpture projected onto buildings around the world, including on Blackpool Tower in Smith’s hometown.
“The moving thing about this album cover is that it embodies a darkness that the band have always had; yet it’s moved into a different look with the cover almost illustrating and embodying the sound and emotions of the album, which has definitely resonated hugely with people who’ve heard it,” says Vella, who has been enamoured by the response so far.
“The album’s going down as classic Cure – not only does it sound like classic Cure, people have commented that it looks like classic Cure too, which is simply immense.”
Songs of a Lost World by The Cure is out now; velladesign.com