18 cover stories in our archive
Behind the Covers' archive includes 18 album covers documented under the "abstract" design theme, spanning the 1950s, 1960s, 1980s, 1990s, 2000s, 2010s. These covers sit within the alternative, indie, pop, rock, electronic, jazz, funk, soul tradition and feature work by Beach House, Tame Impala, Panda Bear, Radiohead 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.
Beach House wrapped their 2015 album in a cover you were supposed to feel, not scroll past: a sleeve lined with red velvet, soft to the touch, an object built to resist the frictionless swipe of the internet. The image is almost nothing but deep red and two lines of quiet lowercase type. Here is why that emptiness is the whole point.
Robert Beatty's abstract image of swirling liquid in vivid colors visualizes the album's theme of overwhelming change — something solid becoming liquid, a form dissolving and reforming as something new. Not chaos, but metamorphosis.
Panda Bear's psychedelic masterpiece features a self-designed cover inspired by his move to Lisbon, with swirling patterns and vibrant colors that perfectly capture the album's hypnotic sound collages.
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.
Peter Saville transformed a simple mathematical formula into one of the most striking album covers of the 2000s, using pure geometry and bold color to capture Bloc Party's angular post-punk sound in visual form.
The US cover of The Strokes' debut isn't a hip in a leather glove. It's the wreckage of subatomic particles smashing apart inside a European physics chamber, an image that had already lived on a Prince record and a science book before it reached Times Square.
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 city street at dusk, a yellow taxi blurred into a streak of speed, and a ring of red that looks like wine staining glass. Dave Matthews Band's 1998 album dethroned the Titanic soundtrack after four straight months at the top. Here is the cover that greeted that arrival.
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.
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.
Trent Reznor gave a British collagist three words: attrition, wound, decay. Russell Mills answered with a two-foot panel built from plaster, rusted metal, dead insects, surgical bandages, and his own blood. The result stares back from The Downward Spiral like something scraped from a fevered wall.
Pearl Jam's debut album cover features a mysterious abstract image that's actually an extreme close-up photograph of pool balls. The band wanted something that didn't scream 'grunge' and found their answer in photographer Lance Mercer's experimental macro work.
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.
A guitarist learned to paint like Jackson Pollock, then nailed three slices of lemon to his canvas. The reason involves a 65-year-old Parisian, tear gas, and student riots from twenty years before The Stone Roses pressed a single note.
A face half-drowned in flowers and shadow, blurred to the edge of vanishing. The man behind The Cure's Disintegration never meant to be on its cover at all, yet there he is, seeping into the dark. Andy Vella built the whole image from Polaroids, projected and re-photographed until colour itself came apart.
Sonic Youth's Daydream Nation features a detail from Gerhard Richter's 1983 painting "Kerze" (Candle), cropped so tightly that most viewers don't realize they're looking at a candle flame. The band discovered the German artist's photorealistic painting in a book and used it without permission, creating one of alternative rock's most enigmatic covers.
The explosive red-orange burst radiating from the center creates one of funk's most dynamic covers, perfectly matching the revolutionary energy of Sly Stone's music. The simple yet powerful design became a template for psychedelic soul artwork.
S. Neil Fujita's abstract painting for Time Out broke jazz album cover conventions, replacing typical band photos with bold modernist art that visually mirrored the experimental odd-time signatures within.