Having crafted a set of songs primed for the full studio treatment, the sextet Better Than Never booked time at the hallowed ground of The Ranch Production House in Southampton. “We had 4 specific songs in mind that we wanted to record, but as time grew closer, it dawned on us that actually, we didn’t want to record those songs at all,” Over time they settled on the material they really liked and the outcomes is far cobbled together. Homemade Hero is built upon an easycore inspired foundation of meaty guitars and grooves, Better Than Never pepper their sound with a layered dual vocal approach reminscent of Four Year Strong and vintage Taking Back Sunday, James and Will’s distinct vocals complimenting each other across cleverly crafted hook lines. With lyrical themes ranging from teen romance gone awry to, erm, Prison Break, Homemade Hero has character in spades, and will surely see Better Than Never making their mark on the UK’s thriving pop punk scene. Ahead of the EP’s release later this month, the band now give you an insight into the artwork….
Behind The Artwork
We’d spent endless nights trying to come up with some artwork that really captured what we felt with this EP. A Lot of our original designs came from our guitarist Jim, he’d done our previous artwork from our demo EP, which featured a guy in a cobbled together super hero costume.
We really wanted to continue this theme with our first studio release, but straight away we just felt that the art style we’d used before didn’t quite sit with our new content, and we began to search for an illustrator who could capture the feeling we were looking for.
There was one guy in particular who caught our eye, a lad called Alduane Mano, possibly one of the best names in history. He had done work with some of our friends bands and we could see he had some mad talent when it came to drawing. We discussed with him our ideas and sent a few concepts, and over the space of the next few weeks, we fine-tuned ideas with him until we got exactly what we were looking for.
The idea behind the artwork was to follow our first release, keeping the feel of a “Homemade Hero” (which ended up being the name for the EP also). Originally we’d discussed him wandering through a forest, but Alduane toyed with the idea and created this wasteland-esque image, we felt it was really cool as it sort of represented that this guy was still soldiering on, even in the face of despair.
Purchase Homemade Hero on iTunes.
