Album Cover Design

run SOFA - ‘FACE IT’

Back in late 2020 run SOFA’s approached me and asked me visualise the album cover design for their sophomore album ‘FACE IT’, together with a new identity design which aligns to them as individuals and coheres to their new album.

FACE IT means facing hardships, facing injustice, facing inequality, facing society, facing the world, through angular, repetitive, no-nonsense post-punk. The cover encapsulates the discomfort and directness of their music, through different body parts pressed onto a scanner. With the typography juxtapositioned and in-your-face, it conveys the brutally honest messaging the band sends on their new record from the outside as well as the inside.

run SOFA exists of two cousins that grew up in the industrial mining town Charleroi, also known as Europe’s ugliest city. They got raised in a musical environment, getting exposed to the 90’s rock scene listening to artists such as Rage Against The Machine, Urban Dance Squad, Beastie Boys and more, which eventually led them to learn how to play music themselves.

Since heritage has been a foundation of the band’s identity, due to their Italian grandparents arriving in post-WWII Charleroi to work in the coal mines, where only a decade later Europe’s biggest mining disaster took place. The Marcinelle disaster of 1956 took 262 lives, and due to the production being halted, the miners and their families received their salary only after the last body was recovered.

run SOFA’s identity design rests on the portrayal of their family and their working class roots, captured by a skewed mineshaft.