If Roland Emmerich’s 2012 and Christopher Nolan’s Inception had a baby—and supposing that baby was born as an album cover—it would be the artwork for pop four-piece Cut Copy’s Zonoscope. Created by the late Japanese artist Tsunehisa Kimura, the surreal photo-montage depicts a New York skyline ravaged by a menacing, Brobdingnagian, end-of-days-y waterfall. “The image relates back to this world we’ve been playing with on Zonoscope, which is a dreamlike combination of something familiar—New York City—and something faraway and imagined,” says Cut Copy’s lead singer Dan Whitford, who spent considerable time and energy securing the rights to the piece for their third album.

Whitford, who, along with the band’s other members—guitarist Tim Hoey, drummer Mitchell Scott, and bassist Ben Browning, Cut Copy’s newest addition—hails from Melbourne, Australia, studied graphic design in college, and went on to co-found Alter, a design studio based in his hometown. The shaggy-haired entrepreneur also launched Cutters Records in 2006, for which he creates party and show invites, as well as album covers. Understandably, with all of the attention Cut Copy’s soaring, euphoric sound has been getting, design has become “increasingly difficult to focus on,” so Whitford gets his fix by overseeing the artwork that accompanies his band’s releases.

For Zonoscope, the group has re-imagined the Cut Copy soundscape, emphasizing percussion and repetition to hypnotic effect. “There are so many terms used to define our sound, but when we’re asked to describe our own music, it’s just art,” says Scott. “People call it ’80s pop or synth-pop, but it doesn’t have to be as specific as five terms strung together to form a genre.” Whitford adds, “Whether it’s called electro-pop, electro-pop-rock, or any of those other weird, made-up genres, we’ve always considered our music to be pop.”

Pictured top: Whitford (second from left) with the Alter design team.