The visual storytelling of Run The Jewels - The Verge

El-P and Tim Saccenti break down the art of Run The Jewels.

We really just wanted to strip all pretense out.

And then I started to feel like, how can we get more primal.

I remember I took a picture of me holding up just some shitty chain that I had and doing the fist and pistol thing and sent it to Nick Gazin, an illustrator we met through Fool’s Gold?

El-P: The pistol and fist clutching the chain really meant, “Give me your fucking chain.” That was the first step in us sort of starting to define what this meant.

El-P: On the second one, me and Mike knew that we were going to put a little bit more of our hearts into the record.

We were going to take off a little bit of the superhero cape and show you a little bit more of who me and Mike really were.

El-P: In the previous Run The Jewels albums, we always have like an action scene in the middle of the record.

This looks like my car just blew up.” I don’t know this.

EL-P: It was just fucking unbelievable to see it come to life.

Tim: The album sounded just like something you would hear blasting out of a car in New York in the ’80s.

EL-P: When you see people holding the logo up in a crowd, no one has a chain.

So in our mind, it really started to become about people, and it really started to become about a declaration of self-worth and self-power and connection.

We’re bringing it into this very high-end reality and using the gold against the blue because the music felt kind of colder.

I shot them kind of like I was shooting a Porsche catalog, or something super rich-looking, and in hyper detail.

I wanted it to feel like something that you could dig up in a thousand years.

That kind of really broken-down, basic approach to putting shapes together simultaneously feels almost primal but also is rooted in the idea of our understanding of technology.

It felt like they would be amazing covers for an electronic act like Boards of Canada or designed for science fiction films.

People would see the cover and be like, “This is a cool 3D piece.” And we’d say “Okay, let’s shoot it again.” We wanted to make sure the texture was showing up.

Tim: We landed on a material that felt like a car?

It was this super shiny black material meant to make it feel a little bit more like an artifact, like a Jack Kirby kind of thing, that had been left in space for millennia and then it just got discovered so was a bit scratched up.

We wanted hints of colors from the other albums — so there’s black from Run The Jewels 1, red from Run The Jewels 2, and there’s gold and little highlights in blue from Run The Jewels 3.

This is supposed to be kind of the penultimate Run The Jewels artifact.

We used Schneider lenses, so these are super sharp lenses, and it’s a 150-megapixel camera because we were trying to shoot it almost like a museum piece, capturing every detail of the artifact.

How does it feel seeing people connect so strongly with the new album.

Now, of course, do I wish that some of the darker moments on this record weren’t the things that connect with how people feel right now.

You realize, “Oh shit this is connecting with everyone right now on a really deep level.” And then you realize there’s no good goddamn reason referencing a man dying at the hands of a cop in 2014 should mean just as much in 2020