The striking cover design for The National’s highly anticipated album High Violet was created by Distant Station Ltd.—the Brooklyn-based design firm headed by Scott Devendorf, The National’s bassist. Like the band’s music, the image is arty, cryptic, dense with occluded meaning, and built on the contrast between monochromatic austerity and explosions of full-spectrum detail. The cover image is a photograph of “Untitled (Binding Force),” an assemblage by the installation artist Mark Fox, who’s also National singer Matt Berninger’s second cousin. (The color-penciled text suspended by wires like a cluster of artificial flowers in “Binding Force” is inspired by Catholic liturgy’s Doctrine of the Assumption of Mary.) Fox’s work, Berninger recently told the website The Quietus, “felt good for the record, because so many of the songs are these collages of thoughts and little ideas.”
The National:
Distant Station Ltd:
See the full Table of Contents for the August 2010 issue