In a Tumblr post from earlier this year, Christian Holden of the Hotelier grappled with a band’s responsibility to address the big issues once they’ve reached a certain platform. After building up a reasonable social media following, Holden questioned if it made sense to regularly discuss their anarcho-punk leanings, even if it might conflict with existing in a commercial band. The singer wondered, “at what point are we System of a Down? At what point are we Macklemore?”
While planning the album art for the Massachusetts band’s sprawling third album, the recently released Goodness, Holden was also cautious about reaching the point when they become Death Grips. The singer knew from the beginning that this cover would center on a group of fully nude, AARP-eligible folks joyfully basking in the sunlight, and sought out Brooklyn-based artist Xirin as a collaborator on the idea. Their working relationship makes sense: Xirin makes uncompromising art that often explores nudity, both originate from Massachusetts, and Xirin once pitched a video to Holden for the Hotelier’s “Your Deep Rest”—just many months after it had been released.
In the early stages, they looked to other covers with non-sexual nudity—including Xiu Xiu’sA Promise, Nirvana’s Nevermind, and, though some may disagree given the erect penis on its cover, Death Grips’ No Love Deep Web—but were careful to consider how this artwork’s thematic intentions differed from some of those NSFW covers. “I didn’t want this album art to do what [No Love Deep Web] did, which is—I think there was an interview with the drummer [Zach Hill], who said that it was like an anti-homophobic thing,” Holden said.
This isn’t to say that Holden’s opposed to discussing LGBTQ issues—the Hotelier are at the forefront of emo’s, shall we say, woke renaissance—Goodness is just a record that’s all but completely divorced from the political in favor of the personal. The band’s 2014 breakout, Home Like Noplace Is There, followed the “personal is political” mantra—which Holden might argue still applies to Goodness—by containing songs that dealt with gender dysphoria, crippling depression, and domestic abuse (on a song that Holden has since clarified as “anti-cop”).
Only after releasing the Goodness teaser did Holden and Xirin realize that they’d have to come up with an edited version of the artwork. Some of the major distributors, including Amazon, iTunes, and Spotify, required them to censor out the nude bodies. They discussed numerous alternatives: hiring someone to paint the photo, placing a multi-colored bar over the models’ bodies, even using an identical photo where everyone kept their clothes on (according to Xirin, this was done less as a viable option, and more “to validate our initial idea, and just to be like, ‘well, this is significantly worse’”).
By blurring out the entire center of the photograph, they opted for an all-or-nothing approach, and it effectively syncs up with the record’s motif of abrupt obstructions in the mix, like on “Settle the Scar” and “You In This Light.” They treat the blurred cover as a teaser of sorts—an incentive to seek out the original artwork on your own. “Instead of making a version of the image that was digestible or easy on the eyes, we just chose to obscure the photo entirely, to convey that we’re sorry you can’t see it… rather than compromise the image and the meaning behind it,” Xirin said.
Unlike other recent NSFW covers, Goodness spotlights ages and shapes rarely seen on album art, naked or otherwise. The online complaints, like thosethatflooded Pitchfork’s own Twitter feed last week upon publishing our Goodness review, have been dispiriting, particularly the detractors who complain about the type of nudity: imperfect, unfiltered, human. In an era when nothing really shocks us, when nearly naked and highly sexualized bodies routinely grace album covers without even a second thought, seeing the desexualized nude forms that resemble how we will all eventually come to look—apparently that’s offensive. We only want lightly airbrushed body positivity, if at all.
Thankfully, Goodness’ ideal setting exists somewhere far removed from the internet’s deluge of dumb arguments. It’s a warm, spacious record about finding harmony with past wounds and the natural world around us. So it only made sense for Holden to seek out a place with spotty cell service to shoot the album’s cover.
After scouting a handful of botanical gardens, the singer seemed set on Ashintully Gardens in western Massachusetts. Once the garden suddenly backed out of the shoot, Holden and Xirin defaulted to a spot much closer to home, and Home: They quickly settled on the trail behind the singer’s house in Charlton. This draws continuity across all of the band’s album art, in that they were staged within walking distance of Holden’s childhood house, with Home capturing a friend’s recently foreclosed house, and Holden looking up at a nearby dam on the reissue of the Hotelier’s first album, It Never Goes Out. But even with the change in plans, finding the right spot proved to be nowhere near as trying as securing the models—or “angels,” as Xirin and Holden refer to them.
They posted an ad to Craigslist, with tempered expectations, that sought older models for their album cover and teaser video shoot. Holden and Xirin made clear that it would involve non-erotic nudity, and included the image of a cherub and rose to hint at their tone and intentions. It was a gradual chain reaction—a few older male models agreed to the shoot, and some of them were proactive in getting more women involved.
Angelina Buff (far right on the cover) was roped in by a friend of a friend of Xirin, and took a major leap of faith. Before the shoot on a sunny September day, which lasted nearly 12 hours and resulted in nearly 3,000 photos, she’d never been nude in public before. But Buff stresses that she’s never been bashful or cared about what others think in matters like this. When I spoke with her about a week before the album’s release, she still hadn’t seen the Goodness cover or teaser due to computer issues. Turns out the aspect of the cover that seems to trouble many commenters is exactly what drew her to the shoot in the first place. “I really liked the fact that—I mean, I’m not obese, but I’m a little overweight—there was all different shapes there,” she said. “There was old, there was young. I think that was free to me.”
They would have liked it to be more diverse, though. Xirin and Holden had a difficult time finding older women for the cover shoot, but getting models of color would have required more outsourcing than they had in mind. “We really wanted to have people of color, but in the end, I’m happy with the group of people we had, because they’re all people who live in that area and were true to the nature of the place,” Xirin said. “It wasn’t like we scouted actors and models from all over.”
Although the models are the cover’s clear centerpiece, Holden wants their nudity to be viewed as just one element bringing meaning to the album—and isn’t too concerned with those who can’t see it in that light. “If they just take the nudity as a piece of it, that is as important as the people standing in harsh sunlight, or that it’s out in nature, or that there’s a shadow on the ground in front of them, it makes sense,” Holden says. “But if they’re not, their critique has less value to me.”