Digipak Analysis: Real Friends // "Maybe This Place Is The Same And We're Just Changing"

Released on 22/7/2014, "Maybe This Place is the Same and We're Just Changing" is the debut record from Illinois Pop Punk Band Real Friends. Signed to Fearless Records, Real Friends have released several EPs and built up a devoted following amongst the pop punk scene, and played the Warped Tour in 2014 on the Journeys Stage. The band recently toured the UK with Modern Baseball and You Blew It! and are now touring America with the UK's most renowned pop punk band and hyped band overall Neck Deep. From these tours, it is apparent that the band are already well known in this industry and this could explain some of the choices made in their artwork. Only a digipak and vinyl version of this record is available at the moment, and this is a common feature of pop punk bands who only release the digipak version over a jewel case (i.e. Neck Deep "Wishful Thinking", Citizen "Youth", The Wonder Years "The Greatest Generation"), proving that the digipak is in fact more popular and preferred over the jewel case in this genre. This could be because the pop punk genre is in a "rejuvenation" phase, with tours such as Pop Punks Not Dead! revitalising the popularity of the subgenre that Blink-182 and similar bands made so popular. The preference of the digipak over the jewel case hence could be because it allows for much more images and meaning to be connoted through the design of the digipak and allow for more promotion of the artist. Common lyrical themes amongst Real Friends songs include sadness and trouble moving on, perhaps the reason behind the album title, as I will explore in this analysis. 

This is the front cover of the Digipak for Maybe This Place Is The Same And We're Just Changing. As you can see, the band rely solely on imagery and the digipak does not feature the band at all. This could be because the image of the band has already been created through the previous EPs and from doing several tours to become recognised in this genre. A house style utilising the colours blue, yellow and white is also created which the rest of the the digipak will adhere to, appealing to the audience aesthetically - Real Friends' previous EPs have not been so artistically constructed and feature rough images or ambiguous ones. The front of the digipak may seem ambiguous at first, but a meaning can soon be established. From the lyrical content of the bands songs, the locked chest could hold semantic meanings of having thoughts trapped and how the album contains these thoughts.

The inside of the digipak continues the themes established by the front cover - still no images of the band are present, and other images of a town and stills of a room are featured, with a vase of flowers on the left which the band also used on posters. The town most directly links with the name of the album, "Maybe This Place is the Same and We're Just Changing", saying that "this place" is the town, Illinois, where the band hail from (the album also features a track called "Spread Me All Over Illinois" further supporting this idea". The borders between the images give it a professional apperance but one that is also very aesthetic and nice to look at. The lack of images of the band is strange because in order to create a motif of the band and appeal to new audiences by including an image of the 5-piece, the band have chosen to simply use images. This could be due to their largely metaphorical lyrics "I miss you like the summer" etc. and how it leaves their audience to decide the meaning of the images and the lyrics for themselves. The digipak lends itself to Hall's Reception Theory, in that the text is encoded with a meaning or representation of the band, and different audiences respond or decode the text in different ways, meaning the images seen throughout the digipak can be interpreted in different manners by different audiences; i.e. they nay see the images to represent something else due to their ambiguous nature. The interplay of the images suggests that they are all interlinked in some way, and their simple nature suggests that they all mean something to the band, but may represent something else entirely to the audience.

On the back cover of the digipak is the tracklist, record label and details and again a continuation of the imagery that we observe on the front cover. The tracklist, of 12 songs, takes up relatively little space, and the main focus of the design is the bookshelf. This again relates back to the album title, "Maybe this Place is the Same...", as it is suggesting that these images depicted, such as the rooms, have not changed at all (similarly to La Dispute's latest release, Rooms of the House) and that they are much the same and ordinary. The font is clear to read and not in an overt font, which is typical of the pop punk genre in digipaks, and also could the order and neatness of the images could contrast the angst in the songs and perhaps chaos that the band articulates into the 12 tracks, ranging from slow sad songs such as "Sixteen", songs about failed relationships and the associated thoughts ("I Don't Love You Anymore") and self-depreciation and angst, particularly from lead single "Loose Ends". The inclusion of the production details on the back cover perhaps shows the humble nature of the band (the thankyous are on the lyric sheet inside the album), and how they are grateful for how the record label have supported them. Fearless Records also hold host to a wide variety of alternative bands, from metalcore acts such as Blessthefall, Motionless in White, The Word Alive and August Burns Red,  as well as more mainstream, "radio-friendly" bands such as Go Radio, The Downtown Fiction, Plain White T's the hugely popular American EDM/Punk band Breathe Carolina, pop rockers The Summer Set and famous pop punk band Mayday Parade. The vastness of the amount of bands on the label and the variety of genres means that by including the record label logo, people can identify the logo and match that with what the label includes and hence if they will like it, which will ultimately increase sales. The simplicity of the digipak makes it easily accesible to new audiences and current audiences alike which will increase the popularity of the band and widen their fan base.

Real Friends have continued themes from their previous EPs. Above are three releases, "Put Yourself Back Together" (2013), "Three Songs About the Past Year of my Life" (2012) and "Everyone That Dragged You Here" (2012). From these we can observe many themes that Real Friends have carried onto the debut LP. These albums were all released on BandCamp, with CD versions of the more recent EPs becoming available to UK audiences on Amazon. White text for the band and text is used in all three designs, and once again the band is not featured in any of them, only images, perhaps again of home town Illinois as referencing home-towns is a common stereotype of pop punk bands. The band have gained recognition from these three EPs without utilising images of themselves, so there is no need to "sell out" in a sense and start self-promotion since signing to Fearless as they already have a strong fan base and can stick to the bands morals and ideals.