5 album covers in our archive
Radiohead is featured in Behind the Covers' archive with 5 album covers spanning the 2000s and 1990s. Released across Self-released and Parlophone labels, the artwork sits in the alternative, rock, electronic tradition. Each cover is documented in our archive with design notes covering digital painting, atmospheric, abstract, landscape, minimalist, minotaur. Below you'll find the full story behind each Radiohead cover — designers, photographers, label history, and the visual choices that defined the release.
Stanley Donwood created this ethereal landscape using a revolutionary digital painting technique, layering translucent colors to mirror Radiohead's groundbreaking pay-what-you-want release strategy with equally innovative visual art that abandoned traditional album cover conventions.
Stanley Donwood and Thom Yorke created this haunting red weeping minotaur by literally setting their artwork on fire and scanning the charred remains. The cover emerged from the same apocalyptic art sessions that birthed Kid A, using destruction as a creative tool.
Radiohead's Kid A wears a range of barbed, snow-blasted peaks with fire pouring from their summits. Stanley Donwood painted those canvases with knives and sticks, and a Kosovo war photo of debris in snow lit the fuse. One late Oxfordshire night, too many cover versions were taped to a fridge until the right one announced itself.
A bleached-bone highway interchange dissolves into white fog, scrawled over with stick figures, the words 'Lost Child,' and a stolen airplane safety card. Radiohead's Thom Yorke and Stanley Donwood built this 1997 collage on a brand-new Mac with one strict rule: no undo key, ever.
Stanley Donwood's haunting medical dummy became Radiohead's visual identity by accident - the art student turned a college project into one of the 90s most unsettling album covers using photocopiers and anxiety.
