Behind The Artworks: The Maple State - Don’t Take Forever (2025)

"Chris Cyprus is a contemporary artist from Manchester who came to our attention a few years back. I first saw a painting of his in a Hebden Bridge art gallery and immediately fell in love with his work. Over the past few years, I visited Chris a number of times in his studio and we bonded over music and a shared love of the nostalgic, and somewhat melancholic romance that you find in the towns and villages that exist in the shadow of Manchester. His ability to capture moments of transition, dawn, and twilight just makes me feel so much. Even though he is painting contemporary scenes, they feel almost mythical and timeless. Like a memory from a time I never actually knew.

 

On one visit, Chris showed me a series of paintings he had started to work on while visiting family in New England, and as I looked at these paintings, I immediately felt that link back to the Midwest emo of my childhood, the Get Up Kids, American football, the Promise Ring, these paintings just transported me back to another time and place. Here was a Mancunian artist who had found that same beauty in visuals, and we had found it in the music. He is able to capture that same beauty in a totally different setting, finding that emotional core - that makes so much sense in Manchester - in these American suburban scenes. One unfinished painting, ‘Waiting for a Friend,’ caught my eye. The more we spoke about the painting and the album, the more it just felt like a perfect fit, so Chris agreed to finish the painting and let us use it for the album art."