Ahead of his debut headline show at the Royal Albert Hall next week, Kojey Radical has extended his creativity beyond the studio for his latest collaboration with Lotus.
Reimagining the Lotus Emeya Hyper GT — the British automotive manufacturer’s luxury sports EV — the East London artist draws from his new album, Don’t Look Down to apply its theme into a wholly different medium.
Having been experimenting with a “Royal Blue” color palette for the project’s rollout, he covers the car’s exterior in the same hue — even recreating the brand’s signature yellow emblem, something Kojey recalls as “the moment it stopped feeling like another collab and started feeling like trust.” Describing the theme of the album being about “pressure, visibility, fear, confidence and being under the spotlight,” as well as the color, the car’s design is also built around the concept of motion, where the emotional range of the album is expressed through how the textures and gradients are revealed depending on how you look at the car.
Before music, Kojey was a keen illustrator and used this multi-hyphenate experience to step in as creative director for this collab. Offering a unique lens to the project, he took a more hands-on approach to the process in contrast to a typical brand-artist partnership, from building mood boards and sketches in the early phases, to testing how light bounces off the car’s exterior to reflect his inspirations of “brutalist architecture, metallic surfaces, deep royal blues, reflections, city lights, and the idea of hidden contours revealing themselves under pressure.”
Hypebeast headed down to the unveiling of the Kojey Radical x Lotus Emeya Hyper-GT at the brand’s showroom in Mayfair, London, to take a first look at the car and spoke to the artist about how the project came to life.
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