Neil Krug talks working with Lana Del Rey, Tame Impala and more

February 2, 2020

For music photographer Neil Krug, growing up in Kansas helped grow his imagination. [...] After an early photo essay went viral on Flickr (“the original Instagram,” he says), in 2010 he published Pulp Art Book, a fashionable hardcover featuring vintage-looking Polaroid photographs of his then-girlfriend, model Joni Harbeck.

Now 36, he’s one of the music industry’s most sought-after art directors, known for creating psychedelic, cinematic album covers for concept-forward artists like Tame Impala and Lana Del Rey while drawing on everything from expressionist art to anime.

Before Del Rey — who was a fan of Pulp Art Book — met Krug in 2014, she thought he was dead. “All these years and we’ve never figured that one out,” he says today. The two soon started shooting images for her third full-length, Ultraviolence, and ended up with over a thousand photos; they spotted the cover almost immediately, which happened to be the first shot Krug had taken. “It was understated, it was haunting,” he says. “I wanted it to feel like the end of a horror film, like the last thing you see before the credits.

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