Music plays an incredibly important part in my life and creative process—at any given moment (when it’s not inappropriate) I am listening to music. For many years now, I have cited Los Angeles-based alternative and indie band Bad Suns as my favorite musical act. I first discovered their second album, Disappear Here (2016), which became my favorite album of all time as well as my favorite cover—it is also this cover that made me interested in designing others. Their newest album, 2022’s Apocalypse Whenever has become a record of similar importance to me on the musical level, but there was always something that bothered me about it. While the fourth album’s content is an incredible evolution of their lyrics and music style, the cover leaves much to be desired. I don’t understand what this visual is supposed to mean within the context of the musical work.
In a graphic design class I took the Spring semester of 2023 at Pratt, our final project was a mini brand campaign. I decided to focus mine on Apocalypse Whenever.
“I’m right, I’m wrong, I’m everything but sure. So we fight until dawn, when five words walk out the door… Would you run after me? Would you run or do we disappear here?”
This album is about learning how to navigate personal relationships, the push-and-pull of love that may or may not be good for you, and the intense desire to lose all of life’s context and complexities behind to find somewhere suspended in time with one other person, as well as how tenuous such disappearances can be.
The cover is an endless void of blue sheets with one obscured figure, their hand laid out as if they fell asleep reaching for someone else.
The hand is of course the most symbolic element to the cover; it is limp, as though tired of searching for what it can’t catch, but just determined enough to show that the desire still burns—that the fight for human connection is not one that ever fully ends.
The dominant sky-blue color of the album also doesn’t overtake the whole design. The blue is at once the background and the force interacting with the figure. Something about the strength and use of color really makes this album cover stand out to me.
“Life tried to break me down, love broke my heart. Made my mistakes, have I learned from them all? Life’s not been pretty but I’m still not ready to die.”
This album features a tracklist of songs devoted to love, recovering from the loss of it, the cyclical nature of life, agonizing over the emotional turmoil of existence, and wondering what one’s life will mean. The cover doesn’t exemplify any of those things to me.
Chief among the complaints I have about this cover is the use of an “altered” version of the Zia Sun Symbol, a Native American design that holds much history and power to the Zia people of New Mexico. The alterations are not sufficient by most people’s standards, and it continues to be a point of contention, as well as something that really rubs me the wrong way about the band that has made music so important to me.
Similar to the second album, the figure in the cover is seemingly femme, but there isn’t the same power to the anonymity of the figure that there was in the second cover. If the songwriter’s attitude towards the impending finality of death, which can come at any moment, was “laugh while you still can” then I might’ve been more compelled, but the lyrics never come to that kind of conclusion. The use of color in this cover is also not so considered or seamless as that of the other one.
