Blue Album Covers: From Nevermind to Joni Mitchell's Blue and Weezer's Blue Album
If red is the loudest colour in record-store design, blue is the most introspective. Joni Mitchell's Blue is literally about sadness; Miles Davis's Kind of Blue made the word the title of an emotional register; Weezer and Jay-Z each named an album after the colour without further explanation. Nirvana's Nevermind shoots the colour through chlorinated water.
Blue covers tend to come in two families. Sky/water blues — Nevermind, Pet Sounds-adjacent, Sufjan Stevens's Illinois — sit in a register of mood and weather. Synthetic blues — New Order's covers, Yeezus's electric flash, the cyan grids of various 2010s indie records — read as the colour of screens and machines.
The covers below span both. What unites them is that the blue isn't decoration — it's doing the emotional work the title and music ask of it.
For more colour-themed collections, see black album covers, red album covers, pink album covers, and black & white album covers.
29 blue album covers in the archive.
SOS
SZA · 2022
MONTERO
Lil Nas X · 2021
Melodrama
Lorde · 2017
"Awaken, My Love!"
Childish Gambino · 2016
Run the Jewels 2
Run the Jewels · 2014
Yeezus
Kanye West · 2013
Hot Fuss
The Killers · 2004
Kid A
Radiohead · 2000
The Battle of Los Angeles
Rage Against the Machine · 1999
Homogenic
Björk · 1997
OK Computer
Radiohead · 1997
Protection
Massive Attack · 1994
Dummy
Portishead · 1994
The Chronic
Dr. Dre · 1992
Rage Against the Machine
Rage Against the Machine · 1992
Metallica
Metallica · 1991
True Blue
Madonna · 1986
So
Peter Gabriel · 1986
Brothers in Arms
Dire Straits · 1985
Hatful of Hollow
The Smiths · 1984
Ride the Lightning
Metallica · 1984
Unknown Pleasures
Joy Division · 1979
Wish You Were Here
Pink Floyd · 1975
Autobahn
Kraftwerk · 1974
Jolene
Dolly Parton · 1974
Maggot Brain
Funkadelic · 1971
Blue
Joni Mitchell · 1971
Abbey Road
The Beatles · 1969
Fresh Cream
Cream · 1966
Frequently asked questions
- Why are so many album covers blue?
- Blue is associated with introspection, melancholy, dreams, water, and sky — useful registers for albums dealing with mood, longing, and atmospheric music. It's also one of the most-loved colours globally, which makes blue covers commercially safe.
- Is Nirvana's Nevermind really a blue album cover?
- Yes — the underwater photography of Spencer Elden was shot in chlorinated pool water at the Rose Bowl Aquatics Center, giving the entire image a saturated cyan-blue cast. The dollar bill and baby are the focal point; the blue is what holds the cover together.
- How were the blue covers on this page selected?
- A build-time script extracts a five-swatch palette from every cover in our archive and buckets entries based on the dominant vivid swatch. A cover lands in 'blue' when its most prominent saturated colour sits in the cyan-to-indigo range and saturation is meaningful enough to read as blue rather than gray.