The triple-CD release.
When The Cure released Songs of a Lost World in November 2024, it topped the charts in 10 countries and was praised effusively by fans around the world. Designer and long-time Cure collaborator Andy Vella joins us with an overview of his creative approach to the visual concept, sleeve, campaign, and the impact it’s had.
When Robert Smith first mentioned this album to me – three, four, five years ago, even longer – I was very keen to work on it because I felt that it would be a great one as it had obviously been brewing for a while and was going to be a response to a lot of stuff happening on the planet. Over the years, Robert and I have collaborated on many covers, starting with Charlotte Sometimes (1981). However, we started working more closely and collaboratively after I released my book, Obscure, in 2014.
I started putting together some visuals based on my assumptions about what the music was going to be and sound like. Having worked with the band for over 40 years, including on the majority of their albums, I can start visualising and creating imagery without even hearing the music.
Typography and logo
I’ve always created a new logo for each album. The logo is designed to correspond with the artwork and respond to the music, so the logos have ended up representing and punctuating the different defining moments in the band’s career. It’s pretty amazing in hindsight that the logos are associated with the sound of each individual album.
The band logo for Songs of a Lost World goes back to the sell-out tour in 2022, Shows of a Lost World. I’d designed all the merchandise for this, together with a new Cure logo, which was very playful, and fans jumped on and adored it. I heard some songs from the new album in Paris as part of the 22 tour and designed another Cure logo in response to them with a custom ‘Cureation’ typeface. This logo was created from eight or so photocopies of my favourite serif fonts, and the typeface had an emotion which really worked around the sound. It’s got a dark sophistication about it with, again, some playfulness in the typography, although it’s hanging onto a slight classicism, too. Robert and I felt that this was right for the new album.
The US billboard.
The Blood Moon special edition.
Album and singles visuals
Once I have the logo, I will start thinking about applying it to Robert’s concept and interpreting it into the album cover visuals. The concept he discussed was using Bagatelle, a sculpture by the Slovenian artist Janez Pirnat. My interpretation of that was to turn it into a solid thing, and I pictured it floating in space, almost as a distant relic from a forgotten time, a buoyant force resisting any kind of gravity. We had the image of this head and wanted to take it somewhere else.
Marble vinyl edition.
The artwork for the three singles from the album.
I got together and collaborated with Ben Parker, a colleague who teaches with me at AUB Arts University Bournemouth in graphic design, a master of the moving image. We transformed the Bagatelle sculpture into various forms to turn it into the object floating in space I had imagined. This seemed like a great opportunity to bring the album to life and represent the lyrical content of the songs. 3D mapping Bagatelle and animating it digitally, we created the website and, most importantly, realised how well this transferred into the out-of-house teaser campaigns and fed into the lyric videos where we collaborated with Robert. These were launched on YouTube to accompany the single releases, with so far over 1.7 million views and counting.
Campaign
The teaser campaign for the out-of-house advertising is mapped around the world, from Argentina to New York to Madrid to Blackpool and Paris. It started with a postcard for the album Songs of a Lost World that was blind-embossed with Roman numerals indicating the release date, 01.11.2024. Only the S, O, L, and W were blind-embossed; the remaining letters are UV and can only be read in UV light.
Invisible ink postcard teaser.
This postcard went viral, with people trying to guess what was going on. We also put up a typographic poster, with white type on black, outside a pub called The Rocket in Crawley (now known as The Railway), where The Cure played their first gig. It was bonkers. Within a week of the poster going up, someone had smashed the glass cabinet that contained the poster to nick it! So you could say that this went viral, too.
We also projected anamorphic videos of a spinning head sculpture with the words Songs of the Lost World onto Blackpool Tower throughout October as part of the teaser campaign – as Blackpool is where Robert was born. These were also worldwide. At the same time, we’ve seen street posters, billboards, and listening posts in various record stores all around the US. Opulent pop-art posters of the Bagatelle head have been popping up everywhere.
UK poster art.
We’ve also created multiple formats of the album artwork—as well as digital releases: marble vinyl, utilising bio-vinyl, reverse-board print, deluxe CD packaging, special limited-edition glow-in-the-dark picture-disc thermographic images of the head that are revealed when heated… all in all, we’ve created eight different versions of the artwork, including a double-cassette limited-edition format. This is all printed in black and white, hoping to minimise our impact as much as possible on the Earth’s resources, together with an accompanying eco merchandise range.
Reflections on artwork and album
The new album is The Cure at their classic best. It’s got an amazing darkness, presenting a graphic reality that describes where we are now as a human species. Musically, it’s very powerful and transports you to a very stark place. The visuals are a designed response to this melancholic sound, interpreting the desolation by portraying a kind of death mask from a forgotten world, a distant time – which in turn becomes a shimmering star for everyone to stand and watch and reflect on from afar.
Out in the wild: a record shop window.
The moving thing about this album cover is that it embodies a darkness that the band have always had. Yet, it’s moved into a different look, with the cover almost illustrating and embodying the sound and emotions of the album, which has definitely resonated hugely with people who’ve heard it. The response to it has been incredible; people totally love it, saying that it represents and works with the music in the most affecting and beguiling way. The album’s going down as classic Cure – not only does it sound like classic Cure, but people have commented that it looks like classic Cure, too, which is simply immense.