A professional wrestler, a children’s book author and the head of a non-profit organisation walk into a bar…. There’s a great punchline to that out there somewhere, but we’ll have to leave that to the neologists. The in-real-life result of this meeting of personalities is South Wales trio Junior, a pop punk band with more on their minds than girls, skateboards and pizza.
“We all liked the idea of a concept album, and building our own little world that’s explained and explored through each of the songs,” says guitarist / vocalist Matt Attard of Junior’s recently released mini-album. Whilst the band’s conceptual ‘JuniorLand’ carries an aesthetic straight out of Pleasantville via a Don Draper ad campaign, its sound is a little more contemporary. In parts reminiscent of Blink 182’s rightfully revered 2003 self-titled album, JuniorLand is highly melodic, swathed in big guitars and layered lead vocals.
Here Matt, who designed it himself, discusses the creation of the artwork….
“As a collective, we love to tell a story. If a record can make you feel something, then it’s an accomplishment, but if it can take you to a completely different place then it’s really something special.
When we started this project, me and Mark had come up with the idea of having this fictional universe, consisting of real life experiences behind the backdrop of a cartoon world, that looks like something straight from the Beano. I’d been really intrigued by the nuclear family America at the time, and I loved the old 1950s style post cards, so this became the basis of the design.
Taking both these influences on board, I used an array of bold colours and added a gritty washed out filter, to create that ageing post card effect. Everything on the front cover has a reason to be there, and every letter of ‘Juniorland’ is a reference to one of our songs. There’s so many intertextual references in there that I’ve lost track of them all! But as ‘Home’ is running theme on the record, there’s lots of nods to our hometown. There’s a dragon attacking Cardiff Castle and the lighthouse that resides in the park by us, to name a few. We also have the artwork from our first EP at the centre, as a way to show where we began, and the surrounding area to show what we’ve grown in to. You can also see a robot in a spaceship taking off, which is both part of the ‘Juniorland’ storyline, and also the main character in a children’s book that I started working on, that I hope to release in the near future.
Something that I’ve always been fond of, is the listener reading in to the artwork and music themselves and finding their own meaning to it. I mostly picked that up from bands like Biffy Clyro, with lyrics so cryptic you can’t possibly know what the original meaning was, but being far from meaningless. To have a record that can mean lots of things to many different people is my ultimate goal, but I definitely know what this record means to me.”
Watch Current Video Single ‘That Pretty Dress’: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=DluZHwoiBHA
EP ‘JuniorLand’ was released on October 16th. Preorder at:
Physical- https://ambitionrecords.tictail.com/
Digital- www.musicofjunior.bandcamp.com
The band: https://www.facebook.com/musicofjunior | https://twitter.com/musicofjunior
