Vanderlust are a melodic metal band from Italy formed in 2019. Describing themselves as “cosmic metal”, Vanderlust's albums features lyrical themes of space travel, astronomy, space engineering, and sci-fi adventures. For their first realease, I have been asked to take care of all the graphics, from the album covers to the booklets to the official music videos.

HIGH HOPES - The Music Video

"High Hopes is a heavy-power metal song, fast and powerful. It mixes technical riffs with a melodic and catchy vocal line; it’s one of our’s most Iron Maiden oriented songs. The lyrics talks about the first human travel to Mars and the great hopes which this mission inspires." Francesco Romeggini, guitarist and founder of the band.

Considering the topic covered by the song, the band requested the video to replicate slavishly the story told by the lyric. The spaceship design fuses a stereotypical futuristic style -the typical one featured in various famous videogames and sci-fi movies- with a slightly retro touch with the aim to delineate the narrated future in a time relatively close to ours.

The production of the High Hope music clips is based on the cooperation between Lorenzo Gestri and Luca Manfredi. Luca, a young and promising videomaker, took care of shooting the real life footages of the band playing on a rocky Mars(ish) red planet (filming location Cava Rossa of Monsummano, Tuscany). He also took care of the video editing and all the greenscreen shots used at a later time in some Lorenzo's 3D shots showing the Vanderlust spaceship bending the space-time to reach Ares, a -fictional- tidally locked exoplanet orbiting around a distant three-star system (in order to avoid possible future copyrights infringement using real Mars photos, we prefered to change our "astromusicians" final destination).

VANDERLUST - The Album and the Singles

For the cover of their self titled debut album, the band asked me to elaborate something visually "exaggerated", but also strongly connected with the message they wanted to express: human kind -and all its issues- is not meant to die on planet Earth. The final artwork therefore is quite self-explanatory: some skyscrapers reaching out far beyond the atmosphere of a colonized exoplanet, like towers standing dangerously on the edge of a massive hole for the "core energy" extraction. The contradictory human instinct to rise and reach the unknown boundaries of the outer universe opposed to the imminent dangerous fall into the hell lurking in everyone's inner universe.

For what concerns the 4 singles covers, on the other hand, I had carte blanche as long as the artworks were faithfull to the themes narrated in the lyrics: the greed of a bunch of deviant space wastecollectors, the mournful swan song of a dying species before a violent mass extintion, the loneliness of an endling alien found by human explorers and the hope of a bright future for the discovery of a new star system...