OVERDRIVE BY CHRIS ROSS
Client: Chris Ross
Year: 2025
Role: Art Direction, Photography, Graphic Design
Team: Connor Ross
There's a moment every music lover knows but rarely has a word for: that involuntary scrunch, the chin tuck, the closed eyes and tilted head that happen when a groove hits so perfectly it almost hurts. It's the highest compliment a body can pay to a song, and it has a name: stank face. The campaign for Chris Ross's album Overdrive was built around capturing that moment and making it contagious.
STANK YOUR FACE OFF
"Stank Your Face Off" as a tagline is both a promise and a dare. It tells you exactly what this music will do to you while simultaneously challenging you to find out for yourself. There's a confidence embedded in the phrasing that mirrors Chris's relationship to his own work. This isn't music that hedges or apologizes, and the campaign doesn't either. The title Overdrive and the tagline "Stank Your Face Off" function as two halves of the same idea. Overdrive names the music: intense, layered, built to overwhelm in the best possible way, with an unmistakable nod to the instrumental world Chris inhabits as a multi-instrumentalist and songwriter. The tagline names what the music does to you.
The anchor image of Chris mid-performance, stank face fully engaged, collapses the distance between creator and listener by showing that the artist is the first person moved by his own music. As a multi-instrumentalist and songwriter, Chris's relationship to his material is total. He has lived inside every note and every arrangement, and that image makes that intimacy visible without ever having to say so. He isn't performing enthusiasm for the camera. He's lost in the groove, and the camera simply caught it. That gives the audience permission to react the same way, and on social media, where shareability lives or dies on whether something feels real, that permission is everything.
ALTERNATE ALBUM COVER
FUTURE ACTIVATION
The social media activation with the most natural momentum is a user-generated content campaign built directly around the tagline. Invite listeners to post their own stank face reactions while listening to Overdrive, a simple, low-barrier participation mechanic that turns the campaign language into a lived experience and generates authentic content that no production budget could replicate. The inherently expressive and slightly self-deprecating nature of stank face makes people willing to share it in a way that a more self-conscious prompt never would. The goal of every activation is the same as the goal of the tagline: to transfer feeling before explanation. To make someone curious enough to press play. Overdrive promises a lot, and "Stank Your Face Off" makes that promise feel inevitable. The campaign's job is simply to make sure enough people hear it.