Kojey Radical Speaks on Transforming the Lotus Emeya Hyper-GT
The latest partnership brings his ‘Don’t Look Down’ album to the car’s design, even updating the brand’s emblem for the first time.
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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Hypebeast: Can you remember your first encounter with Lotus?
Kojey Radical: I grew up in Hoxton Market, Hackney. Lotus wasn’t something I was exposed to growing up as no one had it in the ends. The first one I saw was the Lotus Esprit in a rerun of James Bond’s Spy Who Loved Me, how it turned into a submarine felt like something lifted straight out of a comic book.
What is it about the brand that resonates with you?
A lot of luxury can feel cold or overdesigned, but Lotus still feels connected to the dreamer. There’s heritage there, but it’s also pushing forward, and that mirrors where I’m at creatively. I’ve never been interested in nostalgia for nostalgia’s sake. I’m interested in evolution without losing identity.
The conversations started pretty organically, with an undertone of shock that they were giving me so much creative freedom. Once we realized we were speaking the same language, it stopped feeling like a “brand collaboration” and started feeling more like building a world together.
How did you bring the vibe of Don’t Look Down to the design?
We never really saw it as just a wrap design, the capability for customization at Lotus is truly endless and the last thing I wanted to do was paste the album onto a car. Some of the themes from the project did translate into this design, especially around the color palette. I’ve been experimenting with “Royal Blue” and it seemed like the perfect fit.
Don’t Look Down is an album about pressure, visibility, fear, confidence and being under the spotlight, I wanted the car to feel like the motion and tension from those themes frozen in place. Something elegant from afar, but layered and textured the closer you get. A lot of the inspiration came from brutalist architecture, metallic surfaces, deep royal blues, reflections, city lights, and the idea of hidden contours revealing themselves under pressure. The textures and gradients almost feel alive depending on how the light hits the car, which felt true to the emotional shifts across the album. Put simply, if we took the car and placed it in a literal blue spotlight, what would naturally happen to the car’s form, and what elements would start to reveal themselves.
Talk us through the process of the project from conception to unveiling.
The process was way more hands-on than people probably expect. From early moodboards to material references, color conversations, lighting tests, interior detail, I wanted to bring my best foot forward and show I was really passionate about this collaboration. I had ideas for the Emeya, Eletre and Esprit spiralling around in my mind, I made a deck to present to Lotus and had a bunch of illustrations I stayed up the night before scanning and reprinting to try different colors. I wanted this to feel unique and kept thinking about making something they would want to put in a museum one day. One of the most exciting parts of the process was seeing how they could take 2D random sketches and color swatches and render them to see exactly how they would interact with the car. Full credit goes to the team at Lotus for bringing that to life and guiding me through the process.
In what ways has working on a car as a medium changed the way you view your creativity?
It forced me to think spatially and physically in a completely different way. Music is emotional and audible. A car is tactile, it moves through the world. People interact with it in real time, from multiple angles, in changing light, at different speeds. It made me realise creativity doesn’t have to stay confined to one discipline. Storytelling can exist in so many other mediums. I’m passionate about this and would love to do more one day. A childhood dream was realized the day I saw the car in real life.
How did it feel to be able to officially change the colour of the Lotus emblem for this collab?
Honestly, that felt massive. The emblem is sacred territory for a brand with that kind of history. That was the moment it stopped feeling like another collab and started feeling like trust.
How has this partnership differed from anything else you’ve done before?
Most collaborations still orbit around promotion in some way. This felt more like authorship. I wasn’t just attaching my name to something, I was involved in shaping an emotional language for the project from the ground up. The level of trust, detail, and creative freedom made it feel closer to working with friends than doing a traditional brand partnership. It also challenged me because the audience isn’t just music fans. Car culture, design culture, fashion culture, they all read details differently. So I had to create something that could speak across all of those spaces without losing authenticity.
