Uncle Acid & The Deadbeats Wasteland Album Re-Design

March, 2024

What is a wasteland to you?

This was the first question my professor asked me when I started working on this project. I had chosen to re-design the album cover for Uncle Acid & The Deadbeats’ fifth album, Wasteland. It is definitely a question that is so simple, that I would have never thought of asking myself when redesigning this album. What would be my vision of the album? I was the one redesigning it. I didn’t have to completely adhere to the concept of the album, but rather my own interpretation. Of course, I don’t want to take away meaning from the album. But to me, when I think of a wasteland, I think of a post-soviet wasteland. Commie blocks, cold grey weather, dirty streets and Russian ghettos. Maybe the ruins left behind after a nuclear disaster - something to the likes of Chernobyl. To me, there was something dystopian about this setting - yet so familiar to me (as I am myself, Russian). So this is how I went forth redesigning the album, with my own concept.

But I am not too far off from the album's original concept. In a post-apocalyptic hellscape where everyone lives isolated in walled cities, the population has had their memories wiped clean. Instead of personal experience, they subsist on the information being force fed to them via glowing “propaganda screens.” Sounds familiar?

There’s a palpable desperation that’s unique to this record compared to all other Uncle Acid albums. Things are chaotic. Frontman Kevin Starrs elaborates: “heavily surveilled city environment that’s been completely destroyed. Everyone lives in fear; they can’t get out. Everyone is a slave to these technologies with screens, propaganda—horrible, miserable environment—but the idea is people can escape and go away to the wider wasteland. These are these blood runners, mercenaries. [They’re] looking to open up your skull, wipe your memory, leave you like the living dead. Let’s think of all these chaotic scenes I could write about.” The current climate of technology’s exponential growth and prevalence finds it nesting into every facet of society’s needs and impulses. Starrs admits the parallels Wasteland has to the real world, especially in the UK with CCTV. He concedes that this story could serve as a warning, but mostly, it is a fun story that is conceivably a destiny—or destination—of the next generation feeding their indulgences. “There are parallels to things going on, as I see people being a slave to technology,” he acknowledges. “Just go outside and look at people: their heads are buried into their screen, and [they] can’t even function without it.”

This project was for a typography class which focused on grid systems. Before establishing what typeface I would use, and before skimming through many different typefaces, I did visual research. I looked for soviet signage found on commie blocks and other brutalist architecture. A lot of it was very wide, heavy, geometric, symmetrical and sci-fi. This gave me a better idea of what typeface I should use. I ended up choosing Marvin Visions as my typeface for this project. 

When further researching grids, I needed to focus on my subject matter - how much text, the shape and size of text, what I wanted to accomplish, what feeling I wanted to convey. Brutalist architecture, being based very much in geometrical systems and symmetry, largely influenced this project. Steering away from more experimental grids, I went with more basic ones. If geometry meant brutalism, and brutalism feels heavy, then it only made sense that geometry was something that could make my imagery feel heavy.

As for the art on the cover - I ended up using the art from a soviet anti-nazi & religion propaganda publication made in the 1940s, because I felt that it really suited the aesthetic of the album - the gas mask and helmet contrasting the clear religious iconography. In the original poster, there is a massive swastika on the helmet, and text that reads “Atheist/Without God/Idol / Armed From Head To Toe, The Bourgeoisie Benefits From Preaching”. The Soviets tried to kill two birds with one stone because I can’t see the relationship between the church and nazis. This shows how in the USSR, they would find any excuse to ban the practice of any existing religion and forbid their citizens to practice their own faith. 

Lyric Book - LP