Behind The Artwork: sittingthesummerout - Brick And Mortar (2017)

“We built it from scratch; every drop of sweat went into making something we’d be happy with, and we did some work on ourselves in the meantime too,” reveals sittingthesummerout vocalist Samir Batista of their forthcoming EP ‘Brick and Mortar’. Hailing from Milan, Batista named the act in 2015, following a

difficult Summer, which he reveals “cemented the concept that summer, as a season, wasn’t meant for me.” Completed by Dimitri Sironi and Luca Della Foglia on Guitar, Andrea Daniele on Drums and Cristina Lietti on Bass, sittingthesummerout play a well-crafted, atmospheric take on post-hardcore, blended with vocals that flit between spoken word, frustrated screams and evocative singing, and will surely resonate with fans of Hotel Books, Movements, La Dispute and Brand New. Now, as the sophomore EP is set to be released on Friday, Batista gives us an insight into the creation of it’s artwork…

“The cover art for “Brick & Mortar” took a second to come up with. Luca (guitarist and vocalist) is a great artist who’s really good with drawings, and he’sdone the art for both our debut EP and our single “Could It Rain Forever?”. For this EP, we wanted him to do the artwork again, but Luca wasn’t really satisfied with anything he came up with using his brushes.

Then came the great idea. He drew up a small draft of what he envisioned the artwork to be: a picture of another cut-up image with two fingers trying to put the pieces back together. He asked if we had any idea what picture we could cut up for this, and I had the perfect one in store. I dug up this old photo I had taken with my phone on a flight from the United States and back to Italy, after a long year away, and it just made sense: coming home was not going to be a relief, because it meant having to rebuild many little things and getting my life back on track; definitely not an easy job. 

We played with the colors for a bit, and decided black-and- white would work best. We met up at our practice space, cut up a picture, took apart a wooden tray and spray-painted it white for the background. At that point we realized we hated our handwriting and our fingers weren’t picture-worthy. Panic. Luckily, our dear friend Denise was happy to come help us at a moments notice and provided both the lettering you see on the cover art and posed as a hand model for the artwork. Thanks Denise, you saved us!"