‘Stranger Things’ artist designed Muse’s upcoming album artwork
Fans of the hit Netflix series Stranger Things might have picked up on something familiar in Muse’s upcoming album art. And no, you’re not just going crazy waiting for Season 3.
Everything that we’ve seen from Muse’s new album so far seems straight out of an ’80s sci-fi film. Even the album art for Simulation Theory seems like a poster for an old-school flick.
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The film poster look was an intentional move by the band. In a recent interview with Kerrang!, drummer Dom Howard revealed that he’s been wanting the band to go for the vintage movie look for a while now.
“It was my idea to create something that looked like a film poster,” Howard says. “I’ve wanted to do that for a few albums—some kind of vintage movie poster. That hasn’t worked out, but this time, once we started working on videos with this director, Lance Drake, we realized it would be cool.”
The music videos have all had a mix of different ’80s sci-fi vibes, featuring everything from werewolves to aliens. The music video for “The Dark Side” even featured frontman Matt Bellamy driving away as something followed him from the dark. Yeah, super Stranger Things vibes detected.
That’s not where the influences from the supernatural, ’80s-cult film style TV show end, though. For the movie poster look that Howard wanted, Muse purposely sought out designer Kyle Lambert, who had worked on the Stranger Things Season 2 poster.
“We wanted to do it properly,” Howard says. “We had to find the right person, it had to be illustrated by hand [and] it had to actually look like a movie poster.
“We looked at a few different people, but I knew that Kyle, who did Stranger Things, would be the one. I’d seen a load of his work aside from Stranger Things, and I knew he could nail it.”
Muse directed the artist a little bit in regards to style and color. However, Lambert knew exactly what to do, according to Howard. Wanting to do the concept for so long, Howard’s really pleased with how it came out.
“Now I’m glad the idea finally came to light,” he says. “Plus, at nighttime, on an LED billboard, it’ll look awesome!”
Check out Muse’s Simulation Theory below.
Simulation Theory is out Nov. 9 via Warner Bros. Records and is available for preorder now. The band also announced the cities but not dates for an upcoming tour, which you can see below.
Pre-order Simulation Theory from the Official Store for early access to 2019 headline tour tickets. More cities will be announced! Stay tuned for more details… pic.twitter.com/1fKsvsP93S
— muse (@muse) September 27, 2018
