13 cover stories in our archive
Behind the Covers' archive includes 13 album covers documented under the "censored" design theme, spanning the 1960s, 1970s, 1990s, 2010s, 2020s. These covers sit within the country, pop, punk, alternative, hip-hop, r&b, electronic, funk, rock, experimental, blues tradition and feature work by Morgan Wallen, Olivia Rodrigo, Bad Bunny, The Weeknd 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.
Sitting in his lawyer's office on the way to court, Morgan Wallen glanced at the old courtroom sketches on the wall and something clicked. The cover of I'm the Problem turns that legal chapter into art: a profile drawn in the very style that captures defendants, not pop stars.
A bright purple wall, a defiant stare, and a tongue lettered S-O-U-R in real stickers: Olivia Rodrigo's debut turned a teenage diary into a cover you can't look away from. She picked every sticker herself, chasing a DIY zine feel that spilled across the whole campaign.
A boy pedals a blue BMX straight at you while a car flies through a darkening suburban sky and a house burns behind him. On Bad Bunny's YHLQMDLG cover, look closer: there's a third eye in the middle of his forehead. This is the story of that eye.
A bloodied, grinning face tilts toward the light on the cover of The Weeknd's After Hours. Shot by Anton Tammi against a sickly red glow, it borrows its title from a 1985 film and its menace from cinema. What looks like a portrait is really a confession.
A giant question mark, filled with fractured photographs and torn edges, floats on a clean white square while a screaming crowd presses in from every side. XXXTentacion's 2018 album ? turns a single punctuation mark into its whole identity.
A maroon minivan sits on a cracked Compton street under a hard blue sky, bent slightly by a fisheye lens. It's the deluxe face of Kendrick Lamar's 2012 album, whose standard cover is a real family Polaroid: a toddler Kendrick on his uncle's lap, the adults' eyes blacked out, a 40-ounce beside a baby bottle.
A blazing red square hides a secret behind a wall of pixels: George Condo's phoenix painting, deliberately built by Kanye West to get banned. The story of how a nude monster with a polka-dot tail and no arms sparked a retail war and a Nirvana comparison.
A bald man stares you down against pure black, two fingers raised, gold on both wrists, tattoos crowding his skin. This was 2Pac's final album released while he lived, seven months before a drive-by ended everything. The stare on the cover feels like a dare.
Sixteen photographs in a 4×4 grid, no single hero image. U2 buried their solemn black-and-white past under painted Trabants, carnival masks, a blue cow, and a nude bassist. Here is how Berlin, Tenerife, and Morocco scattered the band across a grid built to feel like flux.
Two businessmen shake hands on a sun-baked studio backlot — and one of them is on fire. Pink Floyd asked Storm Thorgerson how to picture people who hide their true feelings, and he answered: 'Set a man on fire.' A real stuntman, fifteen takes, and a singed moustache later, here's the result.
David Bowie posed as a half-man, half-dog for a 1974 painting so explicit that RCA airbrushed out the creature's genitals. The few uncensored copies that slipped into shops became some of the priciest records ever traded. The twist? The Belgian artist who painted it says Bowie tricked him into the job.
In 1968 John Lennon set up a time-delay camera in a Marylebone flat and photographed himself and Yoko Ono fully nude for an album cover. EMI refused to touch it, 30,000 copies were seized as pornography, and the record had to be hidden inside a brown paper bag. This is what buyers were finally allowed to see.
A London store's mass-produced Hindu devotional poster became the frame for a rock band: Jimi Hendrix and his bandmates painted as arms of the god Vishnu, glowing in pink, orange and turquoise. Hendrix hated it. Decades later, a nation's censors seized copies. Here is the strange life of a cover its own star disowned.