Behind The Artworks: Civil Villains - A Sleeper, Underneath (2026)

The album’s title comes from a line in the song Canvas Stretcher - “A sleeper, underneath which my flower grows” - it’s a nod to transcendentalist writer Henry David Thoreau’s classic 1854 book Walden, in which he describes the arrival of the railroad and each sleeper - “each wooden tie” - as a person being crushed or trapped under the weight of progress.

I’ve always found that image really powerful - the idea that society pushes forward so quickly that people, and the natural world, often get crushed in the process. I’d carried that idea around for years, wanting to create something from it, but never quite finding the right way in.

What stayed with me, though, was the idea of something still managing to grow through all of that pressure - rising up, blooming, refusing to stay buried - a motif, it occurs to me, that recurs across much of our music.

The artwork is, in a way, then, a literal - and perhaps darkly humorous - interpretation of that idea. In putting it together, I think I was also trying to capture the interplay of light and dark that runs through our music, and through lived experience more broadly. That tension - between colour and its absence, melancholy and vitality, strength and vulnerability, scale and dominance - feels central to the whole piece.

Conceptually, there’s a through-line about making music itself, too: putting a song, or any sort of art, out into the world feels like an inherently assertive act - a way of declaring your presence, staking some kind of claim. Given the sometimes forceful nature of our sound, those flowers start to feel almost defiant - bold, insistent, determined to be seen and heard above the noise, to rise through the chaos, despite their stature and fragility.

The main photograph itself is incredibly evocative - it was taken by the Wright brothers and is preserved by the Library of Congress Prints and Photographs Division. But for me, the most meaningful element of the collage is that the flowers come from Henry David Thoreau’s own botanical pressings, made available through Harvard University. That connection brings a real sense of completeness to the concept - as if the idea has, in some small way, come full circle.

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