4 album covers in our archive
Behind the Covers currently documents 4 Kraftwerk album covers from 1974 to 1981. Read together, the entries show how the artwork changed from release to release, with each story identifying the designers, photographers, source material, and design decisions behind the sleeve.
Cover evolution
Kraftwerk's Computer World puts an old computer terminal at the center of the sleeve and places the band's four faces inside its screen. Emil Schult's design made computing look simultaneously domestic, bureaucratic and uncanny years before the personal computer became ordinary.
Kraftwerk turned themselves into a graphic system on The Man-Machine: four musicians in matching red shirts and black ties, arranged with the hard geometry of modernist propaganda. Karl Klefisch shaped the sleeve and Günther Fröhling supplied the photography, creating one of the clearest visual statements of Kraftwerk's human-versus-machine identity.
Kraftwerk turned a railway emblem into a swooping white bird against pure black, the TEE roundel resting where a heart might be. Behind the calm logo lies a scrapped mirror concept, two cities' worth of mannequin portraits, and a title track that would later power 'Planet Rock.'
Emil Schult painted Kraftwerk's original German Autobahn sleeve as a stylized motorway journey: two cars, a rolling landscape and the band glimpsed in a rear-view mirror. Other markets soon gave the same album a very different blue-and-white motorway-sign cover.
