16 cover stories in our archive
Behind the Covers' archive includes 16 album covers documented under the "abstract" design theme, spanning the 1950s, 1960s, 1980s, 1990s, 2000s, 2010s. These covers sit within the hip-hop, pop, rock, electronic, indie, alternative, funk, soul, jazz tradition and feature work by Kanye West, Beach House, Tame Impala, Panda Bear 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.
Kanye West commissioned neo-geo artist Peter Halley to create an abstract geometric painting, then had it photographed on a cheap disposable camera for maximum rawness. The cover changed multiple times during the album's chaotic rollout.
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 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's abstract illustration for Dave Matthews Band's breakthrough sophomore album has become synonymous with the band's visual identity. The enigmatic cover features flowing organic forms in muted earth tones, complemented by C. Taylor Crothers' band photography.
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.
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.