Behind The Artworks: Feldspar - Soft Side (2026)
Everything starts from one object: an old mattress, the kind nobody sleeps on anymore, left out on the street.
A mattress is the softest and the most private thing in a house. It is where you sleep and where you dream, where your nightmares happen, where you make love, where you are ill, where you cry. And then one day it is worn out, and you leave it by the kerb. What has always moved us is that you are not really throwing away an object. The dreams leave with it, and so do the nightmares, and so do the most carnal desires you ever had in it. All of that ends up on the pavement in front of the neighbours, in the rain, where anyone can see the stains. There is the whole title of the record in that image: the softest part of you, left outside, where you never wanted it to be.
From there Chris built the scene around it. The cover is a suburban corner: a tree, a fence, a stop sign, a lost-cat poster that nobody has taken down, and the mattress lying on the dirt with a raccoon standing on it, looking slightly annoyed, as if the block belonged to him. Raccoons live off whatever a neighbourhood throws away, so it felt like the right animal. There is a weed growing up through the middle of the mattress, which is probably the most hopeful thing on the record. Our name sits above it, written in clouds, in a soft lettering that belongs in a children's book, over a picture of rubbish on a kerb. That distance between how sweet it looks and what it actually is, that is 'Soft Side'.
The three single covers are the same mattress on its own, against a flat colour: blue for 'Good Kids', purple for 'Heart Is A Ghetto', green for 'Family Man'. They are not meant to illustrate the songs, but to show the object being carried around before it finds where it belongs, so that by the time the album arrives you have already met it three times.
Chris has drawn everything we have ever put out: the logos, the first album 'Old City New Ruins', various merch artworks, and a number of things that never came out. You hand him an idea and what comes back is better than the one you had, which is why we have never looked anywhere else. He is a tattoo artist, and outside the band he has made artwork for Scowl and Mindforce, and the poster for the night we played with Gorilla Biscuits in Rome. He has this way of drawing something that seems sweet, until you have been looking at it for a while.
Chris drew the picture, and the vinyl package around it — the gatefold, the inner, the labels — was built by Andrea Romeo.
Chris M. Wilson: https://www.instagram.com/chrism.wilson/
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