The Choice Music Awards is an annual celebration of the best Irish albums. We delve a little deeper to discover the story behind the album artwork chosen by some of the contenders and its relationship to the music in question.
Girl Band Guitarist Alan Duggan discusses working with artist Damien Tran on the cover to their second album ‘The Talkies’ and its respective singles.
“The main thing we wanted to get out of the artwork for this record was that it had a sense of continuity. The tracks on the album kind of bleed into one another and a lot of the record is self-referential, so we wanted the artwork to reflect that in an abstract way. We had no idea what that would look like though. We had worked with Damien the artist before on tour posters and we all really loved his style. His work has a certain feel to it that is very recognizably him. Asking him to do the artwork for this whole record felt like a no-brainer.
Damien came back with a few different options in one go and we kinda liked them all. We mainly just wanted to see some colour variations. So ones that didn’t become the album cover became the artwork for singles.
We had very little input into how it actually looked. We had asked for some small edits on some options and we were particular about the colour scheme but the whole process was really Damien’s. He listened to the album and just came back with designs. It’s the cool thing about collaborating with someone you trust. You just have faith in that they’ll come back with something you like and this was the case with Damien.”
Words: Jack O’Higgins
