The Blow: Brand New Abyss album release

Creative direction, design, copywriting, video production, and editing

The Brand New Abyss was released in 2017. The album artwork is taken from a video that we shot for the album’s first release, “Think About Me” (below). The album is a pair with 2013’s self-titled album, and so I wanted to keep the imagery in the same visual world, or, hovering in the void in a similar way.

A segment I wrote for the press release:
”Brand New Abyss was produced in response to, and in spite of, a series of atmospheric upheavals. Early in the composing process two large scale construction sites sprang up outside the windows of the band’s downtown Brooklyn apartment, like dueling high-volume hell-mouths, to which the duo responded at times by joining the noise battle and blasting out their own new beats, and other times by packing up their rig and reinstalling it elsewhere. They often found themselves working in odd locations, like off-season vacation towns and 80’s timeshare condominium colonies, and the songs on the album reflect these environmental contrasts, spanning from intense rap bangers to open-hearted crystalline confessionals.

“Working from remote locations, wherever space to work was available, was disorienting; isolated from community and not seeing themselves reflected in their surroundings, the band had to ritually reestablish a sense of who they were and what was the point. In each new place, they rearranged the furniture and then rearranged the air, making spheres of sound to surround themselves like halos of protection, providing them a feeling of home and radiating purpose wherever they went. When the greater atmosphere dramatically shifted last year The Blow was strangely prepared, already living inside a portable vibe sphere, having practiced for years the art of alchemically transforming gnarly feelings into something nicer.”