The Small Songs Era

Me and my band have made an album called small songs, the album is a genre blending digital post hardcore project encaptulating topics of homelessness, family issues and finding hope in it all.The album takes inspirations from genres among the likes of emo, skramz and hardcore music. To encaptulate the sound of the album we decided on a drawing of me and rayan playing baseball in a field at sunset.The main inspirations for the artwork itself was old MTV shows (like beavus and butthead) and the anime "one outs". I chose for this setting because i associate the sunset with the end of something yet with a happy atmosphere, it is very pretty but you know a sunset will not last long. The baseball theme was simply done because we are a big fan of the sport and we think it represents something drawn out yet tactical, it requires a lot of endurance.The artwork is drawn in photoshop with the use of a drawing tablet.

Above you see an animated version of the album cover which will be used as a spotify canvas, i animated it in after effects using puppeting and perspective

The backside of the album leans more heavily into the early MTV aesthetic

After the release we planned to make a drum kit/sample pack available for download trough our good friends FakeNumberLand. The image above is the image that would accompany and promote the sample pack.

Accompanying the album we decided to collaborate with custom clothing brand "ISELLDEMONBLOOD", we tried to combine both our styles into some collaborative pieces containing more morbid themes like weaponry combined with the baseball theme of the original album art which we screen printed on adidas "blanks". We chose adidas blanks cause in the original cover art the character also wears adidas which i found a cool refrence!

On april 1st 2025 we played a show with a one person band named "that same street". Their music combines Skramz with Hatsune Miku vocaloid vocals. So for the poster i decided to draw the main cover art with Hatsune Miku replacing my character. The text resembles the hand written text we used for the rest of the Small Songs rollout We would also release limited edition T-Shirts only available at this specific show with the hatsune miku artwork on it.

What you see above is a mockup of a vinyl variant, as per suggestion of a friend the vinyl would be themed around an actual baseball, i think the red adds a cute contrast to the green and orange of the cover art.

Unused Content

For the bandcamp release I wanted to switch up the cover art a little bit by simply making the artwork a screencap from Nicktoons MLB for the Nintendo WII. I thought it would be a funny gag for the release as me and Rayan both really like invader zim and thought that the streaming artwork and this share about the same vibe, the zim cover is just a bit more tongue and cheek and a cool extra for buying the album digitally but we ended up not using it for consistency reasons.

I also drew an (unused) single art for the song "Statiegeld". The song itself is quite a sad song about feeling like nothing in your life is your and in your control so i decided to draw me walking out of a studio which is going up in flames. I decided to not use it for the reasons that we didnt release a single for the album and we just didnt like the drawing that much in the end