Over the span of an hour, Willo and Brian candidly talk through the process of creating five of their most memorable and boundary-breaking album covers. Cranking out art for radio records, feels like everything fabric is against.” “But they have to have some value system attached to them, or some identity, or belong to some cultural movement. “I feel like it's okay for records to be mainstream,” says Willo, who has also creative directed tours and performances for Rihanna, Frank Ocean, and Lady Gaga. “Next is our initial public offering,” adds Willo drily. “‘Merger’ sounds so corporate,” Brian says with an eye-roll. This February they announced Perron-Roettinger, a merger of their two businesses. It won a Grammy for Best Recording Package. A few years later, the pair officially collaborated for the first time on Jay Z’s 2013 album Magna Carta Holy Grail, which fused Classical aesthetics with DIY punk and included a secret LP hidden inside the record’s cardboard sleeve. After a stint at the Southern California Institute of Architecture, he was at a friend’s backyard BBQ when he met Willo, who had creative directed Kanye West’s 2008-9 Glow in the Dark tour. “These were from a test shoot that turned out better than the actual shoot.”īrian is a longtime champion of art at the fringes and, in the late ‘90s, founded Hand Held Heart, an indie label that put out early releases from Liars, Chromatics, and Pretty Girls Make Graves. “She looks so great here with dirty fingernails,” Brian says, producing a box set of Florence + the Machine’s How Big, How Blue, How Beautiful. Their record covers can be beautiful, but their best work also gets a kick out of skewering and subverting the glossy conventions that you might expect of music’s biggest names.
The duo come across as straight-talking punks who have graduated from drinking 40s at basement shows but still like the Vans and love the music. Forget Peter Saville – Willo and Brian they are as likely to reference PeeWee’s Playhouse as the political punk band Crass, or Kandinsky’s color theory as truck stop bumper stickers. In conversation they’re passionate, and not afraid to get weird. And so much the better: album art often feels stagnant, and their work is a refreshing shot of adrenaline. The duo’s imaginative merge of visual styles would probably give a purist art historian a heart attack.
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