3 album covers in our archive
Kraftwerk is featured in Behind the Covers' archive with 3 album covers from the 1970s. Released across Kling Klang / Capitol Records, Kling Klang and Philips labels, the artwork sits in the electronic tradition. Together, these covers trace how Kraftwerk's visual identity changed across the archive, with each entry following the people, artwork, photography, and design decisions behind the sleeve. Below you'll find the full story behind each Kraftwerk cover — designers, photographers, label history, and the visual choices that defined the release.
Cover evolution
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.
