A mate played me "Them Changes" years before I saw the cover of Drunk, and I remember assuming an album with a title like that would come wrapped in something loose and cartoonish. Instead I got a bass player staring back at me from underwater, nose just breaking the surface, looking less drunk than genuinely startled. It's stuck with me, mostly because I still can't decide if he looks like he's about to laugh, about to go under for good, or he just likes to watch.
Album Anatomy
| Album | Drunk |
| Artist | Thundercat |
| Released | February 24, 2017 |
| Label | Brainfeeder |
| On the cover | Thundercat photographed submerged nose-deep in a pool of water, wide-eyed and staring directly at the camera |
| Format | Photograph, styled after 1970s soundtrack album design |
| Design | Adam Stover (art direction), Eddie Alcazar (photography), Zack Fox (artwork) |
| Decade | 2010s |
| Buy | Amazon / eBay |
Homage To A Bronson Soundtrack
The retro feel isn't an accident of styling, it's the whole brief. Thundercat had been listening to Herbie Hancock's 1974 score for the Charles Bronson film Death Wish and wanted his own cover to carry that same period-specific warmth, down to the lettering. The title on Drunk is set in Cooper Black, the same rounded, friendly typeface that turns up all over mid-'70s record sleeves, while the back cover credits run in a plainer Franklin Gothic. It's a strange record to model on a gritty vigilante thriller, but the reference was really about a feeling. It's a certain kind of warm, slightly worn '70s design, rather than the film's subject matter.
An Unusual Credit
Look at the sleeve notes and you'll find an artwork credit for Zack Fox, who most people know as a comedian and rapper rather than a graphic designer. He handled the illustrated elements that run alongside Alcazar's photography, and the pairing fits the record's whole personality. Drunk is a funny album in places, sitting right next to some of Thundercat's most vulnerable songwriting, and having a comedian's hand somewhere in the visual mix feels true to that rather than incidental.
The Bathtub That Wasn't
Photographer Eddie Alcazar and art director Adam Stover originally had a much simpler plan: shoot Thundercat in Flying Lotus's bathtub, fully dressed up with bubbles and moody lighting, all set to go. According to Alcazar, the whole rig was ready before anyone worked out the obvious problem; Thundercat is a tall man, and he couldn't fit. The bathtub idea got scrapped, and the shoot moved to a pool instead, which is how a private bathroom concept turned into the wide-eyed, half-submerged image that ended up on the record. It's a small, domestic kind of failure behind an image that reads as carefully composed and faintly menacing. Nobody planned the unsettling stare, they just planned around a bathtub that was never going to work. Sometimes the best cover story isn't the plan that worked, it's the one that had to be abandoned first.
I still haven't settled on whether Thundercat's expression on that cover is joy or panic, and I've come to think that's rather the point of an album called Drunk. A record that swings between goofy party songs and some of the saddest things Bruner's ever written, often inside the same track. Either way, it's one face doing all the emotional work a whole tracklist normally needs a dozen ideas to cover. Not bad for something that started life as a bathroom mishap.
