Northlane - Discoveries (Album, 2011, UNFD)

July 13 2021: Hysteria Magazine feature - How Each Northlane Release Influenced the Oz Music Community

All good things start from humble beginnings, and this whole process began with a barbecue at Jeremy Hart’s house when Northlane came over to WA for the first time in 2010. The band I was in at the time, Statues, were supporting the shows and we were helping out with driving bands around, and it was such an incredible weekend that forged some friendships that would last forever.

The artwork discussion started in early 2011 with Josh giving me an image from the Hubble telescope that they wanted included in the design work, and a rundown of the album and its titles and themes. Playing around with it in Photoshop for a while, I realised pretty quickly that just putting some text over it was obviously not really a great direction to head in. I had done a lot of paper-cutting and collage style work at university, and I thought, what if I print the image out and do something with the paper in three dimensions? I was also really into Japanese ink and paper art at the time, so after a lot of trial and error, finally came to the cube, which is essentially an origami water balloon with sharpened corners and edges. It was extremely difficult to get it to retain its shape and I ripped so many of them before I finally had one that held together long enough for the photos.

The intention with the flow of imagery throughout the jewel-case packaging was that the cube would unfold out into a deconstructed, open version - a play on the album title itself. I used my own hands and the ever trusty self-timer on the camera to shoot the artwork against a white backdrop. The centerfold image is actually one of the discarded prints that ripped, and the original cube remains intact and stored away to this day.

One final point to note is that the Hubble nebula image itself was a dramatically different colourway initially, far more green and orange, so it was heavily colour altered and masked individually out from the original photographs and had selective colour editing applied to create the final version with the strong purple, teal and orange combination. Several pieces of artwork had to be made up across a number of mediums, so a set of layer overlays were created to apply where required to each instance of the nebula.

Shot on Canon 50D with the 50mm 1.8. Edited in Lightroom 3 and designed and compiled in Photoshop.

Click here for the breakdown of the limited edition vinyl artwork.

Above: rear cover, opening spread across the rear of the booklet and tray, and the internals of the booklet.

Below: earlier versions and unedited images from during production. The first version of the cube was actually printed on metallic paper, but I quickly realized the colour reproduction was really odd, and it was going to be quite difficult to light with the sheen from the paper.

Tour posters for the national run of shows with In Hearts Wake, along with the template used by each show to advertise individually.

Merchandise designs for the album tour

Music video for 'Dispossession’ directed by Chris Elder