Album Cover Research

While She Sleeps – This Is The Six

The album cover for This Is the Six is unusual in the way that it doesn’t promote the band as much as most album covers will, however, smaller hardcore bands don’t tend to have pictures of them on the front cover as they feel it’s better to have more of a visual link to the band rather than just them. On this album While She Sleeps have used their logo as the main focal point, this is a really effective method as it allows you to focus just on one section and not multiple like you would have from a band shot as the front cover, it also does create a visual link as you will know exactly what band it is if you were to see that logo on a t-shirt for example, they have also used the logo on their e.p, this shows a nice trend that they did that on their first and they have done it again on the second.

As well as the simple logo design on the front, they have gave the album a very rustic, almost vintage feel by created an old leather look to the album, this is a really effective background to have and the fact everything looks faded gives a really nice aesthetically pleasing cover.

A Picture of the band as the front cover is a good way of promoting how the band look and how they dress, but using a logo gives much more of a subtle but strong link to the band, this is something we could use on our front cover, we could edit it through the use of Photoshop.

Bring Me The Horizon – Sempiternal

This album cover for Bring Me The Horizon’s album is a really conventional album cover and gives a very strong promotion of the band, the use of the promo picture as the cover helps to show of the band, especially the way some of the band members are covered in tattoos; you soon realise that the band is not just known for their music, but for their tattoos as well, pictures like this help to show that off to their fans but people who enjoy looking at body art.

They have shot the picture on a very plain background of a wall, this is very simple, however has allowed them to add the band name above the artists, they have also used a graffiti effect on some of the writing, this looks very effective and also mirrors the roughness of the background, it also gives of a rebellious feel about the band, something that hardcore genre bands like to give off, that they are very stubborn and blunt and like to be their own.

The actual shot is also very well lit, this helps you to see everything very clearly, something we will need to think about if we choose to do a promo shot as the album cover.

Mallory Knox – Pilot

Mallory Knox’s album ‘Pilot’ is an album that has used both concepts in terms of a picture however the band is not shown on the album to help promote who they are as people, this also helps for bands to know they their fans won’t just enjoy their music because they like the look of them, they enjoy it because they love that type of music.

Although they have used an image, it looks like the image may have been drawn or they have used some sort of effect to alter the look of the picture, they have most definitely used an effect to give the album an old feel with the sepia colour, this old feel is used a lot within hardcore genre albums, it gives a feel of it being very precious and sacred.

On this album they haven’t used a picture of them or a logo, this is unusual, they have chosen to use an image that mirrors the title name; this has been effective on this album however I don’t feel it’s something we will do when we make our album cover, but maybe we will look into colour altering via Photoshop to give it an old feel.