Most of Sun Glitters’ album covers rely heavily on double exposure and feature a young girl obscured in a photographic haze. She dances on a beach, her big toe barely touching the sand as she leaps skyward, washed in an overlay of stars. In another, she stands in a field, her head blurring into the blue-purple sky. You never see her face, but there’s something innocent in her anonymity, like a childhood preserved.
The girl in the photographs is the daughter of Victor Ferreira, the Luxembourg producer behind Sun Glitters, who designs his album covers to match the organic, early morning light aura of his largely instrumental music. A graphic designer by trade, Ferreira has no proper training in photography, but he art-directs his album covers using family photos from his iPhone to save time, enlisting his children as subjects to avoid booking models or licensing images from other artists. “If I had a wish, I’d have photographers’ eyes,” Ferreira says, though there’s clearly serendipity in his amateur compositions. “I love when things go fast. That’s why I stopped playing in bands, sometimes I don’t love to wait.” Bathed in orange and yellow hues that look as if they’ve been plucked straight from the perfect family lake house, his covers lend a heartwarming visual unity to already-upbeat titles like “Find Your Way (See)” and “Everything Could Be Fine,” but the precise pairings don’t happen until well after the songs are complete. “First, I listen to the song a lot, a lot, a lot,” Ferreira says. “I try to get into the melodies and make the world after.”