Iron To Gold, flyer for "In The Zone" 7"

Iron To Gold has been my favorite European hardcore band for a couple of years now. A great demo was followed by two incredible EPs in 2011, with these old school Poles perfecting their ultra tight mix of Judge, early Strife and Inside Out. Over time I've come to know the band a little bit, especially after flying them up here for four shows in October 2012, hanging with Pat at Fluff and their guitar player in Exile, Piotr, in Stockholm. Pat asked me to make a flyer for their upcoming third 7", saying "make it look like a flyer for 'Only The Strong' compilation," referring to the early Victory release. In the end, after giving it my own touch, I realized it was pretty close to a Hardware Fanzine look, and so I just went all in with that, as it is a pretty cool thing anyway.

Iron To Gold on facebook.
Iron To Gold on bandcamp.

xRepentancex - Statement rip shirt design

Pat asked me to do a rip of the classic Statement "Prepare For Battle" EP cover. Since XREPENTANCEX contains more characters than STATEMENT, I had to make the font smaller, but I still think it turned out pretty cool. Other than that it was all just quick photoshop stuff to make it look good on a white background. I have made a second shirt for the band too, which should be printed quite soon I reckon. Really glad to be asked to work with these lads, as xRepentancex is one of my favorite current European bands. Pat's riffage is insanely good, setting the band apart from other current 90's inspired units. 

xRepentancex on facebook

xRepentancex on bandcamp

Correction, demo, sticker and shirt

Correction is a band I've been doing with my brother in arms Mattias since last winter. Nick Tape released our demo on the US on his new Flophouse Records and Tapes, and Pat got the European version out on Carry the Weight. Later on we even got an Australian tape out, via Lloyd at Good Clean Hate (props for the OCHC reference dude!).

The tape has a picture of saw mill workers in Sundsvall, Sweden, accompanied by a little text about how they banned alcohol during a strike in their city. The back has a sweet Brotherhood-remake picture taken by Yohanna of Yo Vegan fanzine. I went for a pretty unruly cut and paste layout for the lyrics, and dig how it turned out. I guess I like this side better than the front, in the end.

Here are also a couple of merch items. First off a sticker and patch design. I scanned a tiny picture from an old fanzine that I bought almost 20 years ago. I love old school rasterized images. It is hard as fuck to get the same feel while using filters in Photoshop. I guess I should learn to do it the correct, manual way instead. The words look blurry and fucked up but turned out super cool on the prints.

The shirt has a collage of various fucked up things, with the big Xd up fist in the middle symbolizing not hiding away from any of the world's insanity via mind-numbing substances, religion or other ways to forget about reality. 

Correction at Flophouse
Order the US version here.
Correction at the CTW bandcamp.

Australian version with red X on the tapes.

Dan from Barge fame holding up the US version, also seen below.

Mr Flophouse himself posing with a Correction shirt in Atlanta, and live in Tampa, FL during the Coke Bust "Confined" tour the summer of 2013.

Sectarian Violence tour posters

These two posters were made for the spring tours in 2012 (top) and 2013. I had a lot of fun doing them, especially when trying to make the second one look different while still keeping a recognizable theme. For the 2013 design I guess I aimed at a mix of a punky feel and old political propaganda posters. We have used the image of the Yugoslav anti-fascist partisan Stjepan Filipović elsewhere on a shirt design, and I thought it was suitable to make use of here too. I like how the maps of France, Spain and Portugal, at a quick glance, can be seen as drips of blood. Or at least that's the thought.  

Violent Reaction - Anti-Social Straight Edge

Tom from Violent Reaction asked me to do a shirt saying "Anti-Social Straight Edge," and requested that I'd use the "Flex Your Head" font. That's about all the instructions I received. I re-did the logo on the front to make it a bit more circular, as opposed to the oval shape it had at first, in order to fit it better to the text around it. Still so, with its rather irregular shape, I decided to not have "Violent Reaction" written too perfectly, hense the crooked letters. I then went for the same thing on the arched text on the back, for better or worse.

For a while, there was a rumor that the face on the back belonged to an infamous English idiot who MDC once wrote a song about. That is however just a rumor. 

There have been multiple different colors of this, as you can see here. I have also been told that a misunderstanding in the US led to a run of shirts with the back-print as front-print, but I haven't actually seen any of those.

Nice inside-joke reference in the big cartel description below as well. 

Violent Reaction on facebook.

Violent Reaction on bandcamp.

Violent Reaction has a blog too.

https://soundcloud.com/violent-reaction/sets/violent-reaction-lp

Ego Trip - The Crew demo insert

This one was a bit of a challenge since I needed to get quite a lot to fit into a tiny space. I used a classic image of Terry Butcher all bloody and with crazy eyes after a game against Sweden, and added the boy with the gun, fooling around with a Judge patch on his shirt and so on. The lyrics were hand-written by me, and I made them look quite rugged on purpose - no need to make this look "perfect." 

The throw-up logo was painted by my man Jacob.

Listen to "The Crew."

Ego Trip on facebook.

Sectarian Violence - Conflict of Interest Demo 2013

Before embarking on our spring and summer tours of Europe and the US in 2012, we recorded a few songs that later got re-recorded for the LP, and released them on tape (Carry The Weight in Europe and Bleeding Edges in the US). I did the European design, that also ended up as the main part of the US version. The design is quite simple. The front has the same image that we made us of for the LP. I threw in a photo of the West-Bank wall, adding a picture of a Palestinian child shot dead by Israeli soldiers, making it look like a mural. The back has another picture from Palestine, of a child confronting an Israeli tank with a stone in hand, plus a quote from Malcolm X. 

Sectarian Violence on Facebook.

Sectarian Violence on Bandcamp.

Sectarian Violence - Upward Hostility European Tour Version

During our spring 2013 tour of the UK, France, Spain and Portugal, we sold a large quantity of white label test presses, as the real pressing was delayed. I got the task to do a tour edition cover, and decided to make a classic photo collage. Most of the pictures are from the European and US tours of spring and summer 2012, while the back also carries some other images, such as the French resistance fighter, and the Pentagon. A lot of our friends are featured in pictures, and a lot of the pictures have special meaning to us, which made it a fun thing to present to the guys once I was done.

The lyrics are the same as on the insert of the "real" European version of the LP, originally done by our vocalist Nick, I just printed them and cut them a bit differently. 

Sectarian Violence on Facebook.

Sectarian Violence on Bandcamp.

Hounds Of Hate - Self Titled LP

I think Hounds Of Hate originally got in touch with me after seeing stuff I did for Sectarian Violence. We played a show together in Cleveland in June 2012, and the ties between the people in our respective bands have grown a lot stronger since. Tom (our drummer) invited Flynn from the Hounds to play guitar with Violent Reaction on the two bands' shared US and Euro tours, I booked a show during said Euro tour here in Gothenburg, and so on. The first thing I did for Hounds Of Hate was a shirt (the "CRASS" remake thing, I will post it later). Then they asked me to do the European version of their debut LP. I didn't get many pointers and was pretty much fumbling in the dark, but it turned out that they were into most of my ideas - including the front cover (an old picture from Stockholm), which felt like a long shot. 

I originally wanted to have the CRASS logo on the back, but it was hard to make that look well along with the Assault Records logo. The Old English style logo was supplied by the band. 

The second pressing has the cardboard paper turned inside out, so that the print is on the matte side rather than the glossy, and it fits the design a lot better. In general, the colors run in dark grey rather than black, an idea I got from the industrial landscape that is used on the inlay. I got a bunch of pictures from Braddock, where the Hounds reside, and while it was a hassle deciding how to work with the image adjustments in terms of levels and curves since it was a whole lot of grey tones, the pictures were beautiful. I was worried that it would all end up a grey mess, but it got quite good. 

For the back cover I worked with the image for a while in photoshop, then printed it and re-scanned it, to give it a "rugged" look. 

Sectarian Violence - Upward Hostility LP

It's honestly kind of hard to pin-point who did what on this cover between me and Alex at Grave Mistake Records. We threw ideas back and forth a million times and ended up with this, which I love. The back cover is definitely more Alex than me. The titles and all the rest of the information are all rub-on letters. The band information is actually exactly the same as on our previous EP, that Alex also did. The picture was taken during a stop during our US tour in June 2012, when we came across these three crosses right beside a Taco Bell in North Carolina. An extremely friendly gay man with a bumper sticker saying "damn straight I'm gay" worked at Taco Bell, helped us take pictures and brought us to a near-by lake after work. 

The front is based on an image that I originally dug up for a shirt (see a later blog post about that one) and re-worked a couple of times to fit different formats (tape, shirt and now LP). The white line crossing the band logo was Alex's idea. The record title is my handwriting. 

The US and UK version of the LP are quite different. The full-size "poster" inlay below is my UK version for the Carry The Weight release. Alex decided to re-do it slightly for the US version, using a different font and deleting the white borders around the pictures. All four images are results from my visits to the library, borrowing loads of photography volumes and scanning whatever is cool. Here are pics from the civil war in Spain (top), the Soviet Union (woman with Kalashnikov) and South Africa (fire plus rioting youth). 

The b-side label has a funny picture taken when we played in Warsaw the spring of 2012. The guy to the left is Mateusz, a friend of ours. 

Check us out if you can be bothered:

Sectarian Violence on Facebook.

Sectarian Violence on Bandcamp.

Coke Bust - Live On WMUC 7"

My US buddies in Coke Bust did a live set for WMUC, and my UK lads from Carry The Weight Records released it on vinyl. Perfect match for me. I received some photos, including Nick Tape's handwritten set list. "IDx1" is actually "Another Fucking Problem" from the "Degradation" EP. Nick told me sometime why that song is always written like that on set lists, but I forgot what it was about.

The front cover is a picture from their former practice space. I added the logo on the speaker, and the title in my own handwriting.

The (one-sided) inlay definitely demanded the most time and attention. Nick wanted A LOT of information on a small space. I decided to hand-write his whole story about the recording, making it look like an "authentic" letter. It wasn't easy getting all the specifics about the songs etc in there without compromising style, but I think I got it down pretty good in the end.

The a side label is the most funny thing with the whole design, in my opinion. This EP was released in 2012, which happened to be the last year the football (ie soccer for Americans) team I support played on our beloved stadium Råsunda, before it got torn down. As a tribute to that, I put a picture of its 1930s construction on the label. "What the hell is that?" Pat from CTW asked me. I don't think I gave him a straight answer.

The b side label has Chris Moore from the recording at WMUC, in a Masshysteri shirt.

Coke Bust's website.

Coke Bust on facebook.

Listen to "Live On WMUC" on Carry The Weight's bandcamp.