Behind The Artworks: HELLGO - Etiquette (2024)

When we started working on the artwork, our first intention was to move away from the clichés of the genre. We feel that our music is full of so many nuances and influences that only partly have to do with the post-hc genre. This is why we were inspired by surrealist and minimalist art, which with its aesthetics is very different from the typical genre. The great artists of surrealist art taught us to play with suggestions and dreamlike imagery and to depart from everything that is didactic, rational, and intelligible. The idea was therefore to somehow express the themes of the record in the form of suggestions, with the use of a specific palette of colors and shapes, but the main goal was to create a sort of disorientation. The packaging is thus minimal and clean, controlled in its geometry and shapes. The title ‘Etiquette’ expresses a sense of conformity, but our compositions are so far from being predictable, conforming, and logical in their structure and especially in their development. This dualism between chaos and order is always present in the music of our record: on the one hand, there is a messy, rough, and dirty post-hc soul, on the other a precise and ordered math rock. Our lyrics are often steeped in despair, fear, and pain, but by contrast our musical compositions are far from dark, sad, and hopeless. The color palette of our artwork is meant to express precisely this dualism: there is blue and red, cold and warmth, ice and fire, immutability and chaos, but also light and darkness. The lines are equidistant from each other, symbolizing a sense of constancy, but if you look closely at the overall composition, you realize that it is totally asymmetrical and cannot be mirrored. With our visual and sound imagery, we want to bring the listener into our world, a world made of many suggestions and contrasts, where only some things are what they seem and you can get a little lost.

The cover art of Etiquette was made by Francesco (Frenk) Calzona, who’s one of the band’s guitarists too. Here’s some of his creative works: https://www.instagram.com/temodont/