Mogwai – The Bad Fire

Dieser Tage ist The Bad Fire erschienen, das jüngste Album unserer Postrock-Lärm-Lieblinge MOGWAI. Exklusiv für Popmonitor hat Designer (und Langzeit-Partner-in-Crime) Dave Thomas das Artwork kommentiert, das er für die Platte gestaltet hat – und zwar ausführlich. Und wir meinen ausführlich …

I’ve been lucky enough to have worked with Mogwai on their artwork since „Mr Beast“ in 2006. It’s actually amazing to think that it has nearly been 20 years now. I think I first saw them play live around 1997, so was a fan of the band before I started working with them. I still find it really exciting to be able to be part of the creative process and finding a way to visually represent their ever evolving music. The band give me freedom to come up with ideas and interpret things however it might fit what they’ve created, and don’t give me guidelines or brief as such – it really is just the music. I really don’t have a fixed design style as such and try to approach each album as a clean slate in terms of the exact imagery or aesthetic that might fit that particular album.

The band sent me rough mixes of this new album around June of 2024. At this stage the album was untitled and none of the tracks had any titles either – those details tend to be fixed later on in the process. So the way I approached this album, maybe more that any other design I’ve worked on for Mogwai, was to try to let the music lead the direction I’d go in. As so much of their music is instrumental, more than anything, it’s about trying to capture a feeling or mood and communicate that in a way that also allows other people to bring something of their own imagination into the mix too. I had the tracks playing on repeat in my headphone everywhere I went for quite a few weeks. It’s actually difficult to put into words exactly what I saw in my mind’s eye when listening to the music, but I suppose I also wanted to try to convey something of the actual physicality of experiencing the band live.  So many times I’ve seen them play and the volume makes your internal organs actually shudder and your ears ring. I was looking to find something visually that would reflect that experience somehow, along with how that could tie into what I was hearing on these new tracks.

Starting with the track on the record that would later be called „God Gets You Back“, its looping melody line playing throughout – It brought to mind an image of something immense and slow-moving. The rhythms and sounds suggested to me a spiralling object, geological in scale—overwhelmingly large, immovable. Something that evoked some sort of impending dread that you can’t quite put your finger on.  This sort of set the scene for the imagery I had in mind as I listened to the whole album, sort of fragments of details from the same landscape.

I’d been looking at old fantasy and science fiction comics from the early 20th century, and there was something I loved about the depictions in the backgrounds of the illustrations of what unknown fantastic landscapes might look like. It was based in scientific knowledge of the time, but a lot of it was guess work too. It was this sort of style that inspired the the look of the illustrations I created across album artwork. Whether the landscapes are of an impact creator or a volcano, whether they are on earth or on another planet is not really important, I’m happy to leave the up to people looking at the artwork and listening to the album to make up their own minds.

As with other Mogwai albums I’ve designed over the years like „Every Country’s Sun“ or „As the Love Continues“, I wanted to give the artwork a multi-layered and textural quality.  It feels like a way of visually capturing what the band are doing with sound. This time after drawing the elements in black ink pen, I used an old photocopier to reprint them numerous times and left whatever photocopy noise, dust and dirt that was picked up to remain in the image. To counter the hand-done black line art there was something cleaner and more digital that I felt might capture some of the more delicate sounds I was hearing. The word that kept coming to mind was ‚crackling‘. A sort of visual version of flickers of static or sparks as they fade. I was seeing these in bright colours that could contrast the black. I created some simplified vector shapes and masked areas of painted and ink-rollered texture into those.

Unlike the last few albums, which didn’t include the band or title on the cover, for this album it was quite a deliberate decision to go almost in the opposite direction.  I wanted something bold and legible, but that would have an impact and fit the textured feel of the artwork.  I experimented with adapting and clipping the letter shapes using a narrow, bold typeface. The vertical lines at each end of the word MOGWAI felt like they would fit neatly into the square shape of the cover.  Alongside the band logo, I also created a bespoke typeface that I photocopied, treated and rescanned in the same way as I had with the line drawing to give it a bit life / texture.

I was already pretty close to finishing the ideas on all these elements when the band sent over the title of the album „The Bad Fire“.  Not being Scottish, I’d not heard this term before, but I found out it was a phrase for „Hell“.  Somehow, it worked out perfectly — by chance, the title fitted really well with the feel of the imagery I’d been working on.

Once I’d sent the idea to the band, there were a few tweaks in the colour scheme as we tried different options. In terms of the imagery itself, it did not really change.  From there, I was able to then go about creating extra imagery for the back, inside and labels to compliment the cover design.  It’s my favourite part of the work I do with bands — developing that seed of an idea, creating an aesthetic, and then taking it across the entire release. I love being able to design all the components for different formats — everything from the deluxe box set package, CD, cassette and singles, marketing posters, adverts, and tour merchandise too.

MOGWAI-Mastermind STUART BRAITHWAITE ergänzt. Und ja, die Band ist ja nicht unbedingt bekannt für große Worte …

Dave Thomas’s artwork for „The Bad Fire“ is great and also a psychic achievement as he didn’t know the album title when he designed the cover and somehow made it fit perfectly.

MOGWAI
The Bad Fire
(Temporary Residence / PIAS)
VÖ: 24.01.2025

www.mogwai.scot | Dave Thomas auf Instagram

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