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Albums with cover art ahead of their time
Post any cover art (EPs, single art, etc. are also fine of course) that looks shockingly ahead of its time. There's so many odd examples of artists being strangely predictive of trends far in the future, let's collect some of them.
Note, I totally stole the idea from this thread over on rym, so if you want to see more then look there. Lots of good answers already :)
My answer from the linked thread was pretty much everything Laura Nyro did. In particular:
Smile and Gonna Take a Miracle look like such 90s indie girl shit, especially when you look at the liner notes.
Eli and the Thirteenth Confession and New York Tendaberry look like a couple random singer/songwriter albums releases a few years ago.
Nested looks like an indie pop album released in 2016.
You got me a little paranoid, now, that all the "modern" indie-ish covers didn't invent jack shit and just copied 60s/70s covers. It's pretty obvious with the more 80s/chillwave stuff but I never realized that there's any retro connection with the "too cool to bother" 00/10s indie aesthetic, lol.
I think an important part of this is that we're always influenced to some degree by aesthetics that have come before us. "Modern" Indie probably has some people within it who listened to older 60s/70s music and were inspired by them so they either consciously or subconsciously want to call back to that time (would be my guess).
It's possible, but if you look at the contemporaries of Laura Nyro here (just for convenience), that look is far from the norm: 60s blue-eyed soul 70s blue-eyed soul 60s pop soul 70s pop soul 60s singer/songwriters 70s singer/songwriters. I'd imagine if they were trying to go for a retro look, they'd go for something like the others. And despite her cover art standing out, I don't think someone like Nyro was ever seen as much of a cool underappreciated artist who you'd copy for that reason. Of course within circles that itself could make her (and others like her) cool, but I wouldn't guess that's the case?
Personally, I think it's just a clean look that's natural to come up with if you're trying to keep it simple. Easy to stumble upon, especially with access to digital cameras being near-universal nowadays. I would guess, especially with how difficult it is to pin down where the indie look we're talking about really started or draw direct lines of influence, the technology available to indie artists (along with a lack of a budget to do what others were doing with their covers...and eventually people who do have that budget chasing after the look anyway) just ended up looking oddly similar to some other minimalist approaches from the past.
Maybe...I dunno. Usually the examples of this I find are not terribly influential in general. Like, if they were big influential records, that would make them look more "of their time" since they would be defining their time. Maybe this will be easier when we can more firmly talk about what modern indie is. Really piece together what influenced what and make a coherent story out of it all. We can do that decently well for parts of it further back but it's hard to make a complete narrative. Because there are clearly retro examples that still feel distinctly "modern indie" like a lot of Julia Holter's work. Maybe there is a seed there of one person who looked back at these old soul records and made it the new indie look.
shrug, maybe I just like the narrative of accidentally recurring ideas better.