The follow up to their well received 2013 E.P Creepy, Reasons Not To Sleep sees Southampton’s Miss Vincent switching it from creepy to gloomy. Playing their self-styled ‘moody punk rock’, paying homage to the likes of Alkaline Trio and AFI, RNTS see them take their craft to the next level. “The songs we wrote for this record have a much darker, aggressive, and unhinged feel to them,” says Alex Marshall, lead vocalist and guitarist. As they gear up for release on 11th May via Engineer Records, they discuss the creation of the artwork…
Creating artwork is actually one of my favourite parts of being in a band, whether it’s for tour posters, t-shirts or EP covers. For the ‘Reasons Not To Sleep’ artwork we worked with the very talented Joshua Kelly AKA J-Monster Art. I think I found his page on Facebook one afternoon, had a look through some of his work and really liked his style. There was a Wednesday Addams and an Evil Dead inspired piece that he’d done which totally sold it for us. He takes influence from guys like Godmachine and Dan Mumford, some other great artists that we’re fans of.
Initial Sketch
Aesthetically we wanted the cover to be very dark and moody and make sure it reflected the tone of the music. We originally planned to use a photograph rather than getting something illustrated like we did for our first EP ‘Creepy’, just to do something different, but after throwing some ideas around we realised illustration was the way to go.
The concept came from an EP title we were playing around with which was ‘Into The Dark’, which was intended to reflect our move into darker musical territory. I had this idea of a guy with a light bulb for a head about to turn off a light switch, just to represent the idea of light vs. dark / positivity vs. self-deprecation, which is a big part of ‘Reasons Not To Sleep’.
We told J-Monster what we wanted to create, he sketched an idea and we went from there; we asked for some small changes along the way but mostly we just let him do his thing. I think he totally got what we wanted to do and he was the perfect guy for the job.
Final Artwork for ‘Reasons Not To Sleep’:
Miss Vincent Release ‘Reasons Not To Sleep’ Via Engineer Records
Watch video single ‘How Much Further’ now: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=NS0Ms0uIf2Y
https://www.facebook.com/missvincentband