Some albums tell stories. Others create a world you step into.

When I met with The Capsules and Urinine Records to discuss the band’s debut full-length, the conversation centered less on imagery than on feeling. Their music was intimate and dreamlike—anchored by Julie Shields’s delicate vocals—and we wanted the packaging to evoke that same sense of weightlessness. Rather than illustrating individual songs, the design sought to create an atmosphere that listeners could inhabit before the music even began.

I photographed the imagery myself, combining photographs made in Chicago with others captured through an airplane window at 30,000 feet. The locations themselves were incidental; what mattered was their ability to suggest distance, light, and memory. Multiple photographs were layered together so the images felt less like documents than impressions—fleeting moments suspended somewhere between observation and recollection.

The physical construction of the package became part of that experience. A semi-opaque plastic overlay veils the artwork beneath, softening and partially obscuring multiple elements throughout the package. Rather than revealing everything at once, the package invites the listener to discover its imagery gradually, with each layer subtly altering the one beneath it.

Typography follows the same philosophy. It recedes into the composition instead of competing with it, allowing the imagery and materials to carry the emotional weight. Small graphic gestures—a delicate arc connecting the band name and album title, the mirrored treatment of Reverser, and a pair of birds that quietly appear on the back tray—are intentionally understated. Whether consciously symbolic or simply instinctive, each contributes to an overall sense of movement, reflection, and quiet connection.

The result is a package that doesn’t explain the album as much as prepare you to enter it. Like the music itself, it favors suggestion over certainty, inviting listeners to experience the work slowly, layer by layer.