With one foot in the world of music and another in the visual arts, Graham Coxon is well poised to take on a project like Superstate. The musician, who rose to fame as the guitarist and vocalist in Blur, has long nurtured an art practice alongside his career in music, and his new release, Superstate, sees a coming together of these strands of his career. The concept is spread across a graphic novel comprising 15 stories, an original soundtrack, and cover artwork for both the book and the record created by Coxon himself.

Superstate imagines a dystopian society in which everybody is fleeing a planet in demise. It is a tale of class divide: the 1% are free to do what they want as they await their departure, while the rest are kept quiet via the “government-mandated digital dreamscape” they plug themselves into, which acts as a distraction from the scramble to secure their places on the escape mission. There are angelic forces, AI lovers, feral children, medication designed to limit copulation, and a whole host of characters each with their own unique yet intertwined stories.