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What are your favorite album covers?
Link to images of some of your favorite album art and, importantly, tell us why you like each one so much. Aesthetics alone? How it captures the feel of the album itself? Its connection to the lyrics? Something else entirely?
In the Court of the Crimson King is one of my favorites. It's a striking album, and I have a story: I was listening to it on a break and a coworker needed to borrow my phone, he went to unlock it, and jumped when he saw that face as the background because I had only paused the song.
Two I like just for the art and why. I'm going with these because they're the other two that came to mind:
Merzbow's Pulse Demon because it looks like the album sounds: Grating and intense, but not prickly or startling.
Sunn O))'s Monoliths and Dimensions, which is just Richard Serra's Out of Round X, and with Stephen O'Malley of Sunn for scale0. Like Pulse Demon's art, it looks like the album sounds in a way, but also makes me uncomfortable in a way that makes the album feel better. Sunn O)) isn't as dark as some of their album art would make you think, and it even compliments the sound a bit.
Sunn O))) consistently do some pretty great album art. I really like Soused as well.
That Merzbow cover makes my eyes go funny, which is appropriate considering Merzbow often make my ears go funny (both in a good way)
Pulse Demon reminds me of Animal Collective’s Merriweather Post Pavilion. Animated album art long before that was an actual thing!
I've really got to give King Crimson another shot. It's influence throughout broader culture is immense, if only because of how it influenced Stephen King.
The best part is there's like six major lineups, so if you don't like one era there's always another!
The Dread Pirate Crimson.
Nine Inch Nails - The Downward Spiral's album art is just incredible, and really helps set the tone for the album far better than just hearing Closer on the radio.
While Marilyn Manson has let all us goths down by being the monster everyone claimed he was, and I don't listen anymore as a result... the album art for Portrait of an American Family captures the spirit just as well.
A small indie band I liked back in the day ilyAIMY, I helped package this album in the cases to sell at their concerts while crashing with them at a small coffeeshop in MD. All their albums have some great art.
I'm a big fan of The Return of the Durutti Column which was made of sandpaper on the basis it would damage other records it was shelved with. The sleeves were assembled by hand by the band, the label staff (Factory records, nobody else would do this), and members of both A Certain Ratio and Joy Division. Factory lost money on every single one of the 3600 copies released. But art matters, profits do not. Which is why Factory "failed", of course. The idea was inspired by/directly lifted from Guy Dubord's book Mémoires
I've also always liked Expert Knob Twiddlers by "Mike and Rich" (aka Aphex Twin and μ-Ziq) both of whom do some cracking album covers themselves (I had a poster of the Richard D James album art on my bedroom wall as a teenager) but this one stands out for me. It's fun and it's silly and slightly more entertaining than the album itself which is a little meh.
Darkthrone are mostly pretty meh on album covers but obviously A Blaze in the Northern Sky is worthy of mention, although one of my favourite album covers of recent years is their album Astral Fortress which manages to be both icy cold, lonely and alienating and self-aware and hilarious.. the person in it is wearing a Darkthrone jacket (featuring their album Panzerfaust). I honestly laughed out loud when I first saw this. The album absolutely rocks as well.
Chumbawamba's album WARNING NSFW Anarchy WARNING NSFW I bought the instant I saw it in the record shop, despite having never heard the band before. Turned out to be a great decision because they are ace and if you haven't heard past the joke-that-most-people-missed, Tubthumping I suggest you have a bit of a listen.
Also everything Peter Saville has done but especially Unknown Pleasures
Any other designs by Peter Saville you're particularly fond of? I like Unknown Pleasures, but not sure where to go from there.
Joy Division's Closer, which shares more than a little with New Order's Power, Corruption & Lies in Saville's juxtaposition of classical art with modern pop music. He goes back to this conceit again and again - Roxy Music's More Than This, more modern art in Jarvis Cocker's The Trip and even sculpture with Lorraine's Heaven.
Way at the other end of the spectrum is Gay Dad's Leisure Noise, which is so beautifully simple and stylish.
This top ten Peter Saville album covers article is a pretty good jumping off point, and Saville has all his sleeve design work from 1978 until now on his website
I really like the album cover of The Tragically Hip's Fully Completely. Here's a link to the art directly (mildly NSFW, contains a couple artsy female nipples). It looks bacchanal, maximalist and slightly "off" by the creases in it. I like it a lot.
That Wikipedia image doesn’t do it justice. It didn’t pop for me until I pulled up a higher-res image with better color and, well, I get it now!
H. P. Zinker, Mountains of Madness This is the best picture I could find, it is printed in red and green so you see a different image as you pull it out of the red-tinted sleeve. I admit: I don't care about the music, I'm just a huge Stefan Sagmeister simp, this is all about the design/concept of the actual cover, which is all kinds of genius.
It's definitely not high art, but I always really liked the album art from ZZ Top's Afterburner as a kid, although Eliminator is definitely a better album. I think I'm just a sucker for that 80s airbrushed looking, sci-fi adjacent album art like Boston's first few albums, Journey's Escape album cover and a bunch of other stuff from that time.
As an aside, I generally love that kind of low brow aesthetic. I love cheesy old fantasy/sci-fi book covers, and airbrushed van art, and old-school RPG art too. I don't know if there's a uniting factor or a style that describes those things, but whatever it is I'm into it.
The uniting factor is bad taste. 😆
Joking, of course! I actually love the retro sci-fi aesthetic as well, but the images with people take me all the way out of it. Give me spaceships and galaxies all day long, but I’ll pass on the book covers and D&D art with characters in them.
I'm wounded, lol.
I'm absolutely sure that part of the appeal to me, especially for the terrible book covers, is just nostalgia for when I had the time to browse through the library shelves and just sit around and devour cheesy fantasy novels. My grandmother worked in a public library so in the summers I would sometimes go to work with her and just hang out at the library all day and browse and read. I would just pick stuff out based solely on how rad I thought the cover looked, but sometimes it worked out!
An early love for me was King of the Beach by Wavves. Fun colors, funny graphics, I'm all about it.
Taj Mahal's The Real Thing is another really fun one. I usually have this displayed on the outside of my records if I take zoom calls for work. Just a fun, punchy cover for a fun, punchy album.
Ty Segall's Melted. An early favorite, again crazy, fun colors and a little skeezy. Feels like it reflects that era of Ty's music. A little unsettling and energetic.
Last, I love some of the artwork for king gizzard but am not a huge fan of their album covers. Maybe Oddments if I had to pick one.
I've got an aesthetic.
A Thousans Suns by Linkin Park. Gorgeous, minimal abstract piece that still conveys the meaning (that is, a thousand suns). As a bonus, it makes for a decent wallpaper. (Alternative version that is a lot more diffused, which I think gives it more character.)
The 2003 self-titled album by Killing Joke. There are two versions of it: one has a more yellow background, the other's more orange. I prefer the yellow one.
Euthanasia by Stray from the Path. I liked the previous album's cover, but Euthanasia is on another level. As a bonus, the third track of the album was released as a single, much more minimal yet maintaining the design of a bloodied fingerprint.
If you remove the clutter, A Question of Lust by Depeche Mode slaps. It has that timeless Bauhaus design. One wouldn't need to do much to update it.
Royal Republic's Weekend Man has style. Reminds me remotely of Disco Elysium's visceral style, though here it is much cleaner and more presentable. (Plus, the solist's facial hair is a winner.)
grandson [sic] has so far put out a handful of singles and EPs which all maintain the same theme: thick white frame, lower-fidelity subject (often dithered), and two diagonal crosses as befits the context. Usually the crosses go over a person's eyes (as in War, a modern tragedy vol. 1, Apologize, and Bills. Sometimes the US flag gets involved (a lot of grandson's lyrics are about the underportrayed problems in the American society).
The original artwork for Disasterpeace’s Rise of the Obsidian Interstellar is gorgeous. Purple is my favorite color, so I’m already primed to enjoy it, but the pixel-art aesthetic and composition really sell it for me. The album itself is an incredible progressive rock album done via chiptunes, and the cover captures its spacey-yet-videogamey feel perfectly. Interestingly enough, the album art has since been changed to this, which I also like, but I don’t find nearly as striking. I have no idea why Disasterpeace changed it.
Bear’s Den’s Red Earth & Pouring Rain features a neon, retro, almost vaporwave color palette for an image that, upon closer inspection, is actually a drawing/painting, not a photo. A traditional method used to create a futuristic aesthetic is right in line with the album, which is an indie folk album that features touches of synthwave.
Hikaru Utada’s Bad Mode was written during COVID and came out at the height of the Omicron wave. The home hallway, the sweats, and her child just barely in frame all kind of hit a specific resonance with me back then. I don’t think it’s particularly noteworthy besides that, but when I look at it, I get echoes of that resonance. It takes me back to a specific pandemic feeling. It’s not a feeling I enjoyed at the time, but it’s something that I think is valuable to be reminded of and revisit from the greater safety and security of now.
Phoebe Bridger’s Punisher is another COVID album, this one from mid-2020. I love the color and the silhouette of the rocks in the background. Also, like Bad Mode, the feeling this evokes is specific to COVID at that time and hard to put into words. This one is literally much darker, and so is the feeling. In mid-2020 there was still so much uncertainty and fear, with seemingly no way out. The cover seems to capture a sense of “the end of the world”. It also has an alien/religious quality to it, like the person is looking up to the skies, hoping something up there will save us, because that’s the only hope it felt like we had at the time. Also, this is a full aside, but it took me far too long to realize it was Bridgers in her skeleton outfit on the cover and not just a skeleton on its own. That misunderstanding probably textured my pessimistic interpretation of the cover far more than it should have.
Oh wow, that pixel art piece is absolutely gorgeous. The bits of the album that I've listened to so far are also really good.