Travis Scott - UTOPIA | ALBUM COVER REVIEW

ENTRY 30: la flame continues to push further

Aug 01, 2023

Explore the intersection of sights and sounds with GLASSES, a deep dive into the expansive world of music graphic design.

The Album Cover

*UTOPIA*, Travis Scott. Photography by Kristina Nagel, 2023. Belt designed by Arlette, 2023.

UTOPIA is Travis Scott’s fourth studio album, and easily the most anticipated record of the past couple years.

Placing this new cover (there are five), in context of Trav’s other releases, we can see that similar to the music, each one has tried to somewhat reinvent itself.

Placing all his covers together, there isn’t any overarching visual thread tying them all together, other than Travis being the subject on each. The color palettes of Rodeo, Birds, and UTOPIA are all extremely similar, with an overwhelming theme of browns, blacks, dark reds, and grays.

Rodeo and UTOPIA are actually extremely similar covers, both with dark backdrops (gunmetal grey and pure black respectively), a bottom-right parental advisory, and a shirtless Travis subject. Genius says UTOPIA features him as an action figure again, as an homage to Rodeo, but I just don’t see it. Because of the black backdrop, he does look a little uncanny, as the details are difficult to make out, but he still appears real to me.

Scott posted a flurry of visuals leading up to and after the album’s release, and one included this same cover with an AI looking head on the same body and shot.

I’m not sure why they added this particular version, as it is a pretty small change, but it does add another level of uncanniness and surreal horror to the image.

I do think the main cover for the album was the best choice, and the most commercially viable.

The other ones, while interesting in their own ways, come together to create this entirely disjointed collage of a dirty, grimy, and distorted dreamscape. There were so many visual artists, photographers, stylists, and designers deployed to bring these visuals to life that it was bound to be incoherent to a degree. Unlike the sloppy HEROES & VILLAINS rollout by Metro Boomin and co., UTOPIA’s mishmash of influences, peripherals, and ideas works well to its advantage. When you listen to the album, it really does sound like five photos forcefully jammed together, ripped up, cut into pieces, overlayed on one another, and thrown into a food processor, all in the best way possible.

THE OTHER FOUR COVERS

Speaking of the other covers, in the haze of this release, Travis dropped four other album covers on his socials, all by different visual creatives.

As of writing this, the credits are pretty all over the place, I’ve done some digging and couldn’t find a clean list of who did what exactly on each, but I did include what I could find here.

The images are all photography-based, as far as I can tell, including the mysterious balloon one. The second cover by Pieter Hugo (we don’t know who did the collaging and treatment), appears to be digital collage of some kind, it may have had some assistance from Studio Pending (Bryan Rivera, Travis Brothers, etc.), but we can’t know for sure as it’s mostly uncredited.

Again, as stated earlier, I think this wide scope of imagery and tone adds up really well for UTOPIA, crafting this weird, otherworldly landscape of eerie sights and sounds. My favourite of this bunch is either the upside down face or the balloon one, the latter seemingly influenced by Year of the Snitch by Death Grips.

THE DESIGN PERIPHERALS (CIRCUS MAXIMUS, LIVE AT THE PYRAMIDS, ETC.)

Mentioning Studio Pending earlier, they were in charge of the peripherals for this album, and I only know this as Bryan Rivera was intermittently displaying these posters on his Instagram story during the rollout. Travis released an accompanying film for the album titled “CIRCUS MAXIMUS”, and it got some really cool posters.

Here are a couple found online, insanely good direction by these guys, they seriously truly do not and have not missed ever. The poster on the right perfectly uses scale as a dramatic element to illustrate the size of this release and movie. Travis really does feel on top of the world right now, and we’re all just watching it happen.

These guys also put together some unbelievable merch, one of which I had to buy.

Really crazy stuff here, what can I really even say, it’s classic Studio Pending, distorted versions of what we’ve come to expect from merch. Interesting graphic placements paired with the same extreme mishmash of visual stylings and influences from the rollout, this merch is as good as it gets for me. We have photographic manipulation, experimental airbrushing and illustration, and even some 3D rendering by the looks of some of it. Posty, you coulda stuck with these guys and got more of this same treatment.

FINAL THOUGHTS

UTOPIA, as stated earlier, was easily the most anticipated album of the past few years or so. I wouldn't say it was up there with Frank or Kendrick, but it stopped the world in its tracks nonetheless. From the features carrying UTOPIA branded suitcases around, to the promise and retraction of a “Live at the Pyramids” debut show, the rollout has been one of the most engaging in recent memory. I’m loving the visuals, on every level, in every field they’ve come out in, from t-shirt to album cover, and I salute all the insane creative professionals who pulled this all together how they did. Album is sounding crazy too!