13 cover stories in our archive
Behind the Covers' archive includes 13 album covers documented under the "1990s" design theme, all from the 1990s. These covers sit within the rock, alternative, electronic, country, pop tradition and feature work by The Dismemberment Plan, Fiona Apple, Boards of Canada, Shania Twain and others. Each entry below includes the cover artwork, the designers and photographers behind it, and a short story about the visual choices that defined the release.
Travis Morrison made the strange digital cover of Emergency & I himself, pushing the pixels at a time when some people around the band thought the result looked terrible. Its warped cartoon world was consciously influenced by Fantastic Planet, using surreal imagery to express the anxiety and alienation running through the album.
The cover of Fiona Apple's When the Pawn... is inseparable from the album's famously long title, a 90-word poem Apple wrote after reading hostile letters about herself in SPIN. Apple is credited with the cover-art concept and design, turning the sleeve into part portrait, part rebuttal, and part declaration of control over how she would be seen.
Boards of Canada's Music Has the Right to Children uses a faded family photograph with every face erased into a pale blur. The image was adapted from a real family photo taken at Banff Springs in Alberta, Canada, then transformed by the duo into the perfect visual companion to an album built from childhood memory, educational-media nostalgia and unease.
Shania Twain's Come On Over cover presents her against a white field in a vivid red top, photographed by George Holz and packaged under March Tenth Inc.'s art direction. The image became even more interesting when Mercury altered the album's visual presentation for international markets as it pushed Twain beyond country radio and toward a global pop audience.
Spiritualized turned the 1997 release of Ladies and Gentlemen We Are Floating in Space into a piece of pharmaceutical theatre. Jason Pierce and designer Mark Farrow packaged the CD like medicine, complete with blister pack, foil backing, dosage language and patient-information-style typography. The idea grew from Pierce's belief that music could function like medicine for the soul.
Suede's Coming Up cover turned three models on a striped mattress into a fluorescent hallucination. Brett Anderson brought Peter Saville into the project; Saville and fashion photographer Nick Knight shaped the imagery, Howard Wakefield designed the sleeve, and digital paintbox work pushed the photograph toward the lurid, ambiguous glamour that matched Suede's brighter 1996 reinvention.
Thane Kerner designed and illustrated Dave Matthews Band's Crash cover, splitting the sleeve between deep purple and red around a dense abstract form that seems to shift between machinery and plant life. C. Taylor Crothers photographed the band for the wider package, but the front cover itself is Kerner's illustration.
Ben Folds Five's debut looks less like a polished major-label campaign than something assembled around a piano: snapshots, handwritten marks and the instrument that made a guitarless trio such an anomaly in 1995 alternative rock. Alexandria Searls is credited for the album's photography. Thirty years later, the cover has fresh relevance as the band reunites around an expanded anniversary edition built from a long-lost first attempt at the record.
The Holy Bible turns Jenny Saville's monumental triptych Strategy into one of the most confrontational sleeves of the 1990s. Richey Edwards and Nicky Wire chose the painting for its collision of flesh, beauty and discomfort, making the cover feel inseparable from an album obsessed with bodies, power, control and damage.
Hole's Live Through This cover turns a beauty-pageant winner into something unnerving: model Leilani Bishop wears a tiara and grips flowers while mascara streaks down her face. Ellen von Unwerth's photograph takes the language of glamour and pushes it toward collapse, creating one of the defining rock images of the 1990s.
PJ Harvey's Rid of Me cover was made in photographer Maria Mochnacz's tiny Bristol bathroom, in total darkness, with a flash and barely enough room for the camera. Harvey's soaked hair became a sculptural arc across the frame. When Island suggested cleaning up the wall, drips and plant, Mochnacz refused. The imperfections were the point.
For Pixies' final album before their original breakup, Vaughan Oliver and Simon Larbalestier built a false planetary surface from salt and real bull's eyes. The result is one of the strangest sleeves in the band's 4AD catalog: tactile, bodily and deliberately deceptive.
Heaven or Las Vegas looks less like a photograph than a memory of light. Designer Paul West and photographer Andy Rumball built the sleeve from blurred colour, hand-made lettering and carefully cropped transparencies, creating an image that seems to hover between flowers, neon and pure atmosphere.