Violent Soho Deny Copying Album Cover From Sydney Artist

Having just released their hotly anticipated album, WACO, last Friday, as well as picking up two awards at the QMAs and possibly their very first ARIA #1 album, Violent Soho have copped some heat from social media punters, who have accused them of ripping off WACO's album art from Sydney-based artist James Jirat Patradoon, which the band has denied.

Though the post has since been taken down, it read, "How good is it when succesful [sic] Australian band / their label asks James Jirat Patradoon to use his artwork, then when they didn't want to pay a reasonable (already discounted) rate — got someone to just completely rip off his work for cheap."

Violent Soho issued a statement on Facebook this afternoon to explain the situation.

"It was never our intention to copy another artist’s work," the band said via Facebook.

"We believe in supporting artists and paying them properly - as we always have from day one. We hope to work with James in the future as his work is sweet and we are big fans.

"We are in discussions with both artists – James and Pedro – to make sure everyone is happy and our team are going through the usual process of making sure all the rights are properly cleared. There’s no bad blood among us and we're all mates."

The band also gave some background into the process to explain any similarities between the two.

"To give a bit of context we actually know James and had been in discussions with him about commissioning this exact piece for an old 7” cover over a year ago, before WACO was even recorded. For various reasons we didn’t end up going ahead with that piece.

"When it came time to sort the WACO artwork we decided to work with another great illustrator Pedro Oyarbide whose style we also love and who knew the direction we wanted – the letters WACO in Red on a Black background, with an illustration of a guy throwing a punch inside the letters."

Having studied at the College of Fine Arts UNSW, Patradoon reportedly made the piece titled Having Begun I Had To Go On, 10 years ago while doing his Honours year.