You can tell a lot about an artist by who they collaborate with – and how often those collaborators return. Who Is the Sky?, the ninth solo studio album from David Byrne, sees the art pop iconoclast and Talking Heads frontman reunite with a host of past creative partners, including St Vincent, Hayley Williams of Paramore and the Brian Carpenter-led ensemble Ghost Train Orchestra.

Another familiar name is New York-based graphic designer Shira Inbar, who served as album designer and co-creative director alongside Byrne. Inbar’s flair for editorial design first drew Byrne’s attention in 2021, when she began working on Reasons to be Cheerful, his nonprofit online magazine of good news stories. “I started out animating some of David’s doodles,” Inbar recalls. “Then I worked on the magazine’s design, and later did graphics for a live show in New York celebrating its five-year anniversary.”

In early 2025, Byrne emailed Inbar out of the blue. He was working on a new album: would she be interested in designing it? She didn’t give it a second thought. Soon after, Inbar received a characteristically oblique brief. “David showed me this gallery of images he’d collected,” she says. “Traditional costumes, masks and ceremonial outfits from Mexico, Nigeria and other countries.”

During that initial research phase, Inbar says she and Byrne “looked at how different cultures around the world express themes of transcendence, hiding and revealing through ritualistic wear. We were particularly inspired by the dramatic nature reflected in the work of photographer Phyllis Galembo. We wanted to create a contrasting effect of disappearing, while also being hyper-visible.”

Aside from photographic material, Byrne shared the unmixed songs but offered no lyrical or musical explanations, leaving space for Inbar to develop her own visual interpretation. “I immediately thought of [American artist] Nick Cave and his Soundsuits,” she says. “There’s this mosaic in the Times Square-42nd Street subway station, which I ran into a few weeks after we started working on the album. We were drawn to the detail and energy of each Soundsuit, and how they radiate outwards into the space in between them.”

Inbar and Byrne also studied the way Yemeni-Bosnian-US multimedia artist Alia Ali employs patterns and textiles to blend foreground and background, blurring the line between person and place. At some point, they even discovered an old doodle of Byrne’s depicting a figure covered head-to-toe in bristles, which Inbar reflects “was a sign that we were headed in the right direction”.

The doodle became a crucial reference for one simple reason: it doesn’t obscure the subject’s face. Inbar explains: “The question we kept asked ourselves was, ‘How can you cover yourself and at the same time reveal something about yourself?’ I was reminded of the Oscar Wilde quote, ‘Give a man a mask, and he will show you his true face.’ There’s definitely an aspect of that here.”

The patterns were all made of duplicated images of David, gradually scaled up. It magnifies him, but it also camouflages him. The artwork invites the audience to step into another reality

That famous aphorism led Inbar to Belgian fashion designer Tom Van der Borght, whose psychedelic sculptural suits elevate everyday materials such as buttons, ropes and zips into otherworldly spectacles. “I really like that tension,” Inbar says, “the idea of turning mundane objects you might find in a hardware store into something almost phantasmagoric.” She gave Van der Borght a call and he agreed to lend the project his eccentric sartorial eye.

Around the same time, Byrne asked Inbar if she knew any photographers – a request she admits took her by surprise: “My first thought was, ‘You worked with Robert Rauschenberg! You must know plenty of great photographers…. Why are you asking me?’ I guess it was David’s way of asking me if there was someone I wanted to work with. That’s what he’s like: he pretends to not know.” Inbar suggested fellow New Yorker Ahmed Klink, whose bold style and technical skill made him a perfect fit.

With Klink and Van der Borght on board, Byrne and Inbar set about pairing each song with its own visual theme, which would be expressed through a different treatment of Byrne’s image. “The patterns for the album cover and the individual songs were all made of duplicated images of David, gradually scaled up,” Inbar says. “It magnifies him, but it also camouflages him. The artwork invites the audience to step into another reality – to transcend and escape from the confinement of ourselves.”

When it came to the shoot, Inbar was free to experiment in real time, applying different image-cloning effects as Klink snapped away. There were two custom suits created by Van der Borght, and for each one a set of still images and videos was captured. “The main suit was so heavy,” Inbar laughs. “It must have weighed 40lbs [18kg], but David happily danced around in it for hours. I don’t know how he managed.”

After settling on a preferred style, Inbar repeated the process for the album’s title. “With the typography, I used the same duplication technique, cloning images of David along a path to reveal each letterform. It was another way of staying true to both David’s vision and Tom’s ethos of reclaiming and reappropriating everyday materials.”

The result is a kaleidoscopic cover that explodes with colour and movement, echoing Byrne’s music in its mix of joy, curiosity and mystery. It’s easy to imagine that, were it not constricted by the square format of a record sleeve, the artwork would stretch infinitely in every direction. It feels somehow limitless.

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A special edition of Who Is the Sky? adds yet another layer of dimensionality: a lenticular cover. “I’d only worked with lenticular once before,” Inbar says. “For the Republic of San Marino, of all places – they asked me to create a set of collector’s stamps for the 50th anniversary of the Moon landing. It’s such a magical medium; motion and print coming together. It was fun to revisit it.”

Every detail of the album’s design amplifies its central concept of playful transformation. The packaging even includes a double-sided poster that preserves the green-screen backdrop against which Byrne’s resplendently suited body was photographed. “Again, it’s about trusting the materials around you – and the people too. Finding ways to get the best out of both.”

Who Is the Sky? is out now via Matador Records; matadorrecords.com; shira-inbar.com