Guess the Decade

Every era has a look. The hand-lettered warmth of a 1960s jazz sleeve. The airbrushed surrealism of the seventies. Eighties chrome, nineties grunge photocopy, the flat digital gloss of the 2010s. Design dates itself even when nothing on the cover says so — and this quiz asks whether you can read the decade off the artwork.

Each round shows one complete cover from our archive, with the album title and artist hidden. Pick the decade it was released from four options — and they are the decades closest to the answer, so 1971 against 1968 rather than 1971 against 2019. Ten rounds, no timer. The pool draws on 380 covers from the 1950s to the 2020s, and every answer links to the full story behind that cover.