03/07/2026
Amsterdam surfpunk city. Now here’s something we made almost 30 years ago – it’s the record sleeve we designed for ‘Leaded’, the seminal fourth studio album by Amsterdam punk legends NRA (which stands for not really anything), originally released in 1997 by Virgin Europe:
www.instagram.com/p/DaUrGFzivMb/
The album has recently been reissued (and remastered) by Excelsior Recordings – and to retrieve the original artwork, we had to undertake some serious digital archeology, digging through obsolete disks and scratched CD-roms looking for the original files, doing some nerve-wracking doctoring and reformatting in a prehistoric version of QuarkXPress (on an ancient, ever-crashing laptop). Talk about lost formats. Anyway – we managed, and the sleeve is restored to its former glory, so do check it out when you have a chance:
www.instagram.com/p/DaUrGFzivMb/
Pictures 1–2 show the front and back cover. Pictures 3–4 show the inner sleeve (front and back, with the infamous liner notes set in sadistically small type). Pictures 5–6 show the front label and back label. Part of the same series, and straight from our archive (but not reissued), there’s also an A2-sized poster (picture 7), a CD, a CD-single, and a die-cut sticker sheet (picture 8 ). And picture 9 shows all the objects together. Metallic art-damaged Eurostile skatepunk for the masses:
www.instagram.com/p/DaUrGFzivMb/
So yeah, we originally designed this all in 1997 (possibly even 1996) – and, as we already said, the album has just been re-released by Excelsior Records, so give it a spin. And thanks to nratheband for asking us to design this sleeve, back in 1996 (in fact, we already did some T-shirts for them as early as 1994).
