Polaroid3 – Untravelled Roads EP and “It’s All I Have” music video
Polaroid3 is a French band founded in 2011. Inspired by Portishead, Laurie Anderson, and Tricky, they describe their music as “trip-pop”. Polaroid 3 released a first well-acclaimed album in 2017. In 2020, they followed up with the EP Untravelled Roads.
The artistic direction of this album was made by Philippe Savoir aka Filifox, who created a gloomy atmosphere as much in the album artwork as in the music video for “It’s All I Have”, produced in collaboration with Arthur Goutté and released for Valentine’s Day 2021. In the latter, singer Christine Clément drives a car that doesn’t move, while clowns sit silent and still in the backseat. This melancholy scene is disturbing as we are waiting for anything to happen but it doesn’t. We find this slightly anguish feeling in the design of the album as well, where the main colors are black and red. The characters even seem to be spilled with blood.
The text is set in Minotaur from Production Type, which in this context acquires an unexpected Goth connotation. Philippe Savoir played with the caps and text alignments, as we can see in the video clip’s opening credits. The interesting thing about using the typeface in such a big size is that we see the multiple facets that compose the curves of Minotaur: in a metaphorical sense, it seems that the characters of the album also have multiple faces, as the sad clowns hide a complexity behind the stereotype they bear. In short, the album art shows a world where appearances are misleading and Minotaur contributes to it.
