What it’s like to create album art for the world's greatest hip-hop artists
- Text by Locke Fitzpatrick
- Photography by Vlad Sepetov
Album art creates a portal through which we can experience a musician’s art and message in a completely different medium. These works add depth to the sounds that permeate through our ears, the music that leaves a lasting impression forever linked to these powerful aesthetics.
Whether it was shifting through your parents’ 12-inches or buying your first CD and poring over the inlay on long car trips, we all have a fond memory of an album where the visuals helped turn a collection of songs into a fully realised world.
Everyone remembers their favourite album differently: the memories of who you were with, what you were doing and what was important to you back then.
Vic Mensa artwork by Vlad Sepetov
Now a new project is letting some the most prolific visual artists in the industry recreate their most treasured album covers, past and present. The Fantasy 12 exhibition poses the same question to 17 visual artists: “If you could re-imagine the album cover for any iconic record (past or present), what would it look like?”. One of those involved in Vlad Sepetov.
Vlad Sepetov is responsible for creating several visual masterpieces cherished by the current generation of music lovers, graphic designers and visual artists.
Donal Thornton’s re-imagining of John Coltrane’s Love Supreme.
You might like
The utopic vision of Black liberation in ’60s & ’70s jazz
Freedom, Rhythm & Sound — As Pan-African optimism spread across the world in the postcolonial era, Black-led record labels gave artists space to express themselves away from the mainstream. A new book collates 500 groundbreaking albums and their covers.
Written by: Miss Rosen
“I didn’t care if I got sacked”: Sleazenation’s Scott King in conversation with Radge’s Meg McWilliams
Radgenation — For our 20th Anniversary Issue, Huck’s editor Josh Jones sits down with the legendary art director and the founder of a new magazine from England’s northeast to talk about taking risks, crafting singular covers and disrupting the middle class dominance of the creative industries.
Written by: Josh Jones
Free-spirited, otherworldly portraits of Mexico City’s queer youth
Birds — Pieter Henket’s new collaborative photobook creates a stage for CDMX’s LGBTQ+ community to express themselves without limitations, styling themselves with wild outfits that subvert gender and tradition.
Written by: Isaac Muk
The suave style and subtle codes of gay San Francisco in the ’70s
Seminal Works — Hal Fischer’s new photobook explores the photographer’s archive, in which he documented the street fashion and culture of the city post-Gay Liberation, and pre-AIDS pandemic.
Written by: Miss Rosen
The stripped, DIY experimentalism of SHOOT zine
Zine Scene — Conceived by photographer Paul Mpagi Sepuya in the ’00s, the publication’s photos injected vulnerability into gay portraiture, and provided a window into the characters of the Brooklyn arts scene. A new photobook collates work made across its seven issues.
Written by: Miss Rosen
Joe Bloom’s View From a Bridge
More stories, more human — The artist and creator of the vertical video generation’s most loved storytelling platform explains the process behind creating the show, and the importance of bucking trends.
Written by: Isaac Muk
