Indie album artwork

This is a collection of different indie band album designs that I thought were particularly eye catching. 

I found that some designs focus around animals and wildlife, without the band being the focus. The images are artistic and non-conventional, often playing on strong editing, conjoining many images into one. 

This gives me an idea of how far we can use editing many images together for the front cover.

Firstly of Montreal's album cover above conveys wildlife, with flowers and if you look closely the bigger monkey within the image, you will find it is holding a cocktail class, it looks like a spirit drink of some sort, which is quite ironic for a monkey to be holding it in this way. The colour scheme is bright and interesting because the closer you look at the image the more weird creatures you find; in my opinion the flowers look a little bit like monsters with large teeth. This album artwork looks so good because it makes you look closer and interpret it how you will, rather than seeing pop artwork which simply displays the artist, usually in a provocative manner, if they are a female.

Next up is the 20 Minute Loop album cover, this is a very strange piece of artwork, and it has incorporated Japanese art, in an animation form, along with giant human dressed bunnies. This image is dream like because of the strange elements that have been incorporated. I'm not quite sure what the message is, but the bunny looks mischievous and a little sinister in my opinion. As for the colour scheme, pale colours dominate the artwork along with the title standing out in this album, unlike the of Montreal cover, which is hard to interpret.

The Drums album is so classic and simple, the blue curtain, which leaves me with an image of the band getting ready to jump on the stage and start performing. The white block letters work so well, because they are the main focus and it gets straight to the point of who the band are. This also shows me which kind of genre the band are in, because it's not a name of an artist, such as Katy Perry, or Alex Clare, or David Guetta like in pop. Indie artists have cool band names.   

The above image is the album 'Meet Me on the Left Coast' by the band, The Summer Set. To be honest I had to research this one, because I had no clue who this band were, and the writing isn't the clearest. I like the polar bear, this particularly represents my ideas about indie bands using animals and nature in their artwork. It reminds me of Ben + Jerry's Baked Alaska ice cream, probably just because of the polar bear and the similar colourings. I like the design, but yet again this tells me nothing about the band. The fonts are grey, pale yellow and pale grey, the album title is meet me on the left coast, so I guess this relates to the polar bear in some way. Maybe polar bears are found on the left coast. : / Overall I like the font, but it's a little hard to read.

Foals Antidotes album cover is interesting because of the sort of Banksy distortion of the boys face. It's interesting to see the pale cream background, with the main focus being the mouth, which is bright and the most intriguing thing to look at. His eyes seem blank, this could represented the fact he can't speak in some way and his views are not heard because of this focus on his mouth. Also this is interesting because there is no real image of the boy, it's a sketch; this might not even be someone in the band.

I've found that Indie album artwork, doesn't have to include the band, it allows the creativity to flow and the more artistic and creative you are the more interesting the album looks and some people like walking into a shop and seeing a crazy looking CD; they might buy it because of this aspect. Pale colours and abstract images seem to be a common theme running through all of these albums, apart from maybe The Drums image.