![]() His singles have been peaking high on the charts for the past three years and he was even named one of Time Magazine's Most Influential People of 2018. Now, our dear Shawn Mendes is only a few years into what will surely be a long-lasting career, so why should he have to announce himself again? He's undoubtedly flourished into a household name. When a self-titled record surfaces later in a career, however, it typically signals reinvention - think the surprise visual album that ushered in a whole new golden era of Beyoncé, or The Beatles' transcendental, revolutionary White Album. For innumerable musicians it's their debut, their grand announcement of themselves to the world: Bowie, Madonna, Fleetwood Mac. Last night, in response to a Twitter question about the reason for self-titling his newest output, Mendes responded: "I wanted to stamp this moment in time at 19 because ive never felt so true to myself." Self-titled albums are typically meant to serve one of two purposes. The singer's team had seen this, and sought out Monreal to bring the current album art to fruition. Mendes had taken direct inspiration from a fan edit, conceived using a filter on the photo editing app Photo Lab, which had itself co-opted Monreal's Bonded design. But, as the adage goes, good artists borrow while great artists and app developers steal. ![]() Fans instantly drew the link between Monreal's project to Mendes's new album artwork, and the singer was thrust into his closest brush with anything resembling scandal when some tweets accused the singer and his team of stealing from the collage artist. That is, until the internet noticed that the iconography sort of rang a bell.īrazilian artist Marcelo Monreal's has built an oeuvre from his digital portrait series Faces Bonded, which consists of photos of actors and models whose faces have been dislodged to reveal the natural beauty that lurks behind outward appearance. Mendes, dashing as he is, has surely been photographed from every possible angle - but this radiant depiction, with his million-dollar face severed for a floral arrangement to burst through the cracks in his porcelain skin, seemed to promise a side of the teenager the world hadn't wholly laid eyes on before: his inside. ![]() While the covers of his previous two records, Handwritten and Illuminate, maintain a distance by using homespun photos of the burgeoning pop star, the image for this self-titled work completely opens the singer up. ![]()
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