Music Festival Framed Album Covers…
We love a music festival and after far too long away thanks to the Covid-19 pandemic, mercifully it looks to be full-on-festival-fun this year, and we can’t wait to get back to dancing in a muddy field somewhere with our pals, drinking warm beer and watching amazing live acts this summer.
For 2022 Reading & Leeds have put together an epic line-up that covers off a huge spectrum in music with rap, rock, pop and everything in between, from first-time headliners Dave, Halsey and Bring Me The Horizon, to old stalwarts Arctic Monkeys and Rage Against The Machine. We had a rummage through our vinyl record archives to pick out our favourite album covers from a selection of this cracking musical line-up, to create our very own Music Festival Framed Album Covers Line-up.
Dave – We’re All Alone in This Together
Released July 2021
Artwork by Tyler Remikie
The nation’s favourite UK rapper and first-time Reading/Leeds headliner Dave‘s second studio album includes guest appearances from Stormzy, James Blake, Wizkid, Snoh Aalegra, Boj, Fredo, Ghetts, Giggs and Meekz. The cover art uses a rework of Impressionist painter Claude Monet’s work, Impression, Soleil Levant by British artist Tyler Remikie, and beautifully portrays the album’s themes of loneliness and mental health.
Bastille – Give Me the Future
Released February 2022
Artwork by Ryan Vautier
British Electro-pop maestros Bastille have a plethora of excellent album cover art in their discography, but we’ve gone for Give Me the Future, their fourth studio album from 2022 for this Virtual Reality concept cover art by the London based CGI artist/designer Ryan Vautier, who perfectly embodies the album’s themes that explore both the opportunities of new technology and the dark side of lives lived online.
Run the Jewels – Run the Jewels 3
Released December 2016
Artwork by Timothy Saccenti
US hip hop supergroup Run the Jewels’ third album cover is a showstopper. Art directed by Timothy Saccenti, the piece follows on from the original drawings by Vice art director Nick Gazin used on previous Run the Jewels records.
Arctic Monkeys – AM
Released September 2013
Artwork by Matthew Cooper
It had to be this classic album cover for the Arctic Monkeys by graphic designer, Matthew Cooper who has worked with such luminaries as Franz Ferdinand, Four Tet, Caribou, Floating Points, These New Puritans, Noel Gallagher and Paul McCartney to name just a few. The waveform depicted is characteristic of an amplitude modulated (AM) signal, and brilliantly hides the album’s name AM.
Bring Me the Horizon – Sempiternal
Released April 2013
Design by Oli Sykes
While frontman Oli Sykes may have had a hand in the artwork for the Sempiternal album, the geometric symbol actually pre-dates this record by a few thousand years. The geometric figure is often referred to as the flower of life. There was however some controversy over BMTH calling out Coldplay for copying their artwork for the cover of A Head Full of Dreams when, on its release, Sykes tweeted “Coldplay jackin our steez hard” ….Album cover art wars – love it! Let’s get this one framed and on the wall!
Click to find out how to decorate your home with your favourite vinyl records
Little Simz – Stillness in Wonderland
Released December 2016
Cover art by Mckay Felt
British rapper Simbiatu “Simbi” Ajikawo aka Little Simz is riding on a wave after her 2022 Brit Award for Best New Artist, and finds herself topping the Reading/Leeds line -up this year. We pulled out her second album from 2016 from our archives, Stillness in Wonderland for Illustrator McKay Felt’s intriguing hand-sketched imaginative world. Little Simz went on to release a deluxe version of Stillness in Wonderland that features a slightly different version of Felt’s cover artwork with her eyes open and a new colour scheme, but this is the one we’ll be putting on the wall for our display.
Halsey – If I Can’t Have Love, I Want Power
This stunning cover art was specifically inspired by the ‘Virgin and Child Surrounded By Angels’ from Jean Fouquet’s two-panel Renaissance oil painting called Melun Diptych, and became a subject of widespread attention and discussion on the internet. A censored version of the album cover, where the exposed left nipple is covered by the baby’s hand, is also available. Halsey stated that the artwork portrays “the sentiment of [her] journey over the past few months, and aims to uproot the social stigma around bodies & breastfeeding.”
Wolf Alice My Love Is Cool
Released June 2015
Cover photography Rachel Thomas
We went back to the debut studio album by English alternative rock band Wolf Alice with this clever piece of photography by Rachel Thomas. In 2016, My Love Is Cool was reissued as a limited-edition box set, containing a 12-inch double gatefold vinyl of the album so it fits snugly in our frame no problem, using the ingenious “Sponge Fingers” on the back that adjust to the difference in thickness of vinyl records.
Rage Against the Machine Evil Empire
Released April 1996
Artwork by Mel Ramos
We love this album cover for RATM’s second studio album Evil Empire that features an altered version of a painting of the 1940s–1950s comic book hero ‘Crimebuster’ created by Mel Ramos. It was created as a portrait for a family friend called Ari Meisel by Mel Ramos as an 11th birthday present. The group saw the painting in a book of Mel’s and liked it, then adapted it for their album cover.
So there you have it, our choices for a 2022 Framed Festival Line-up. But the choice is yours to create your own music festival framed album covers from your favourite acts and change them as often as you like by popping open our unique flip frames and changing the records over. You can even put your wristband in with one of the framed records as a memento…once you’ve had a jolly good wash and packed away your tent obviously!
