Between Two Sunsets – The Story Behind the Afterglow Cover

by PZ

Afterglow by Boxedge came to me like a quiet current — slow, electric, emotional.
Each track seemed to speak of something fading… or perhaps something that endured despite everything.
A sense of melancholy, yes, but also of suspended beauty.
Like that moment when the day surrenders to night, but leaves a trace of light that stays burned into your eyes.

Those sensations sparked the image.
Not a precise image — but a direction.
A need to visually express that emotional threshold where light meets shadow, hope meets illusion, and memory meets time.

That’s when I felt the urge to paint the cover.
And so I searched within myself for the places that held those emotions.

There was a subtle light that day in Brittany.
I stood on the tip of the pink granite coast of Ploumanac’h, among cliffs carved by time.
A fine breeze moved gently through the air, as if trying to suspend everything.
The sun was setting slowly over the ocean, igniting the sky in shades I had never seen before — copper, blood, molten gold.
And above, within the clouds, flickered flashes of blue flame — like lit shadows in the sky.

That sunset stayed with me.

Years later, in another time and another world, I looked out from the window of the Boxedge studio.
The Tuscan hills after the rain.
A suspended silence. A hint of mist.
Another sun fading slowly — but with the same intimate, mysterious intensity as back then.
That’s when I knew the cover had to be born between those two places.

I took up my digital tablet and began to paint.
But I didn’t want it to look digital.
I chose to simulate oil painting: thick pigments, broad brush strokes, like those left by a flat, oil-soaked brush.
I wanted the layering to show, the texture to remain visible, the marks of the hand to survive.
I wanted it to feel like a physical painting — alive.

At the heart of the composition, suspended between earth and sky, there’s a line of light.
It’s not just the reflection of a sunset.
It’s a boundary — or perhaps a passage.
A place where light meets darkness — just like in the music of Boxedge.

To me, Afterglow by Boxedge conveyed these sensations: residual hopes and fading illusions,
hidden tears and enduring memory, stories that dissolve and others that return, always balanced between the shadow and the blaze.

The result is Afterglow.
A landscape that doesn’t exist — and yet feels real.
A horizon that unites two memories, two silences, two sunsets.

Afterglow. (Album) 2025

Afterglow (Signed & Numbered Vinyl)

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