Jadu Heart - Album Cover
Jadu Heart is an indie electronic and psych rock band from the heart of London. My first discovery of them came from a collaboration with beat producer and artist Mura Masa on U Never Call Me, a song that ended up on their album Melt Away.
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Tasked with redesigning an album cover, I chose Jadu Heart for their unique sound and unrefined identity so I could find more freedom in my design for this assignment.
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New Cover
Jadu Heart follows a new era of music that returns to the wavey, psychedelic sounds of the 60s while combining drum machine sounds, synths and stacked echoing vocals from the 80s. This combination finds a groovy, hippie sound while the scene of London falls to raves, drum and bass, and trap music. The diverging sound makes for a wild, cold landscape for this relaxed sound.
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The sound of escape and need for color in a bleak lifestyle calls for a darker vision of the duo's release, representing the yearning for love in a world of grunge, drugs and failed relationships.
Jadu Heart's original album art for Melt Away
It was clear the masks of the group should be featured, giving a greater connecting storyline from their first released singles to their first full album. Jadu heart writes that Dina and Faro (the masked figures) are, "living in London and unable to hide behind a carefully curated facade like the rest of us," but most importantly, "they represent our deepest insecurities."
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Looking to unpack the facade behind London's public, I searched for London street photography to find the right image that could help contrast love in peculiar places.
This was made for educational purposes and I do not intend on copying this artist's gorgeous street photography or repurposing it for sale
Following the theme of love, I focused on the couple kissing in the mid-ground, repeating the image to present a "blooming love"
Taking literal inspiration from the album title, I added a dripping effect to the masks, as if they were getting broken down from the circumstances of their environment. Keeping the delicate features of the iconography in the background as piercings and tears, using the album title as a tattoo, the album deserved the grit that it speaks of in the lyrics.
Album covers are a great way to demonstrate an artist's commitment to an idea. Drawing users into a new realm before they listen to the first song is important for an artist to achieve a specific mood with their music.
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Following the release of their newest album, Hyper Romance, I am impressed with the likeness of the grunge and gritty textures on the new album cover compared to the remake I have created here and I look forward to their future collaborations.