A blurry, ghostly photograph of a hooded figure barely visible in darkness — like surveillance footage or a half-remembered dream. At release, the artist's identity was unknown, making the faceless cover a literal representation of musical anonymity.
The cover is a blurry, ghostly photograph of a hooded figure, barely visible in darkness. The image is so obscure that the subject is almost abstract — a smear of light and shadow that suggests a human presence without confirming it. The color palette is limited to dark blues, blacks, and the faintest hints of artificial light. It looks like a frame from a security camera, a half-remembered dream, or a figure glimpsed from a bus window late at night.
The cover perfectly encapsulates the aesthetic of Burial's music: spectral, nocturnal, deeply emotional, and profoundly lonely. Untrue combines elements of UK garage, dubstep, ambient music, and R&B vocal samples into something that sounds like the city at 3 AM — empty buses, flickering streetlights, rain on windows, and the distant sound of someone else's music playing from an unseen room. The cover's visual obscurity matches this sonic atmosphere of urban loneliness and half-presence.
At the time of the album's release, Burial's real identity was unknown. The artist behind the music refused to reveal their name, give interviews, or appear in photographs. The faceless, anonymous cover was therefore a literal representation of the artist's stance — they existed only as sound and shadow. The mystery of Burial's identity became a cultural phenomenon, with music journalists and fans speculating endlessly about who was behind the music. (The artist was eventually revealed as William Bevan, a South Londoner, when his identity was disclosed by Kode9, head of Hyperdub, in 2008.)
The anonymity and the ghostly cover were part of a broader statement about the relationship between artist and audience in the digital age. In an era when pop musicians were becoming increasingly branded and visible, Burial offered the opposite: music without a face, sound without a body, emotion without a persona.
Untrue is considered one of the greatest electronic albums ever made and a defining document of 2000s London. The cover's ghostly, anonymous aesthetic influenced a wave of electronic music artists who adopted similarly faceless, atmospheric visual identities. The album demonstrated that electronic music could be deeply emotional and personally expressive without any of the conventional markers of pop stardom. The hooded figure has become one of electronic music's most recognizable non-images.