I almost always start conceptualising an overall image to begin with but on this occasion I started with the colour pallet which is almost always the last thing I do. I also figured out a couple of patterns that I wanted to work in and then made vector assets of logos that I thought might come in useful later on in the layout. The easiest to source and copy was of course The Wu-Tang Clan. I also worked on assets for Calm Bomb Collective, which is Krohme’s label.

 

 

 

Then the fun bit. Going on the song title, Day Of The Dead, there were two instant chains of thought. The first was Dias De Los Muertos which would easily provide a wealth of inspiration and interpretation and the second was to reference George A Romero’s film of the same name. I resisted both totally. No colourful festival skeletons and no zombies! I did however want to address the themes and social commentary that Romero weaved into the subtext of his film Day Of The Dead into my piece. 

 

I came up with two initial ideas. The first being a packed commuter train filled with passengers who had the appearance of being asleep but were actually focussed on their mobile devices. This answered the social commentary of consumerism and its distractions. The second image was the destination where the train was headed. A desolate empty platform with no signs of life. The intention was to mirror the sentiment within the passenger train.

 

 

With the line work finished I progressed onto colouring. At the same time, the musicians I’d assembled were well into the recording process with finished guitar and bass takes submitted for production and drums in pre-production, the pace of the project was moving along impressively. Krohme insisted that I provide a vocal for the track as he’d envisioned a melodic contrast against Killah Priest’s rhymes. No pressure. 

 

 

I found a bold font for the title that I was happy with and toyed around with a few different layouts before moving on to how best present them on the single cover. Initially, I liked the appearance of a hastily applied sticker but found when I overlayed them, they just didn’t work. A note came through that the song was shaping up nicely and that we’d be going for a physical release on 7” vinyl as well as the initially intended streaming release. So two things needed to happen. First was a B-side. No pressure. The second was to conceptualise how the vinyl might look. This also meant that rather than choose which graphic to go with I now had a front and back cover.

 

Record centre label, how it would appear on a record and something resembling a final product. At this stage, work was finished on the B-side and we had a working title of The Time The Tide. In the meantime Killah Priest had heard a final mix of the track Day Of The Dead and was so happy with the finished song that he found a place for it on his latest album Ragnarok in advance of our official release. The Spotify statistics numerate that it is the most streamed track on the album by thousands of plays.

 

 

 

 

With production finished on the music and the designs signed off and submitted, a physical release will be manufactured and distributed in the summertime.