3 cover stories in our archive
Behind the Covers' archive includes 3 album covers documented under the "cinematic" design theme, spanning the 1970s, 1990s. These covers sit within the hip-hop, electronic, soul, funk, r&b tradition and feature work by Raekwon, Portishead, Curtis Mayfield. 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.
The purple-tinted cover of Raekwon's solo debut established the visual template for Wu-Tang's cinematic crime saga aesthetic. Shot like a noir film still, it transformed hip-hop album art from street photography into sophisticated visual storytelling that matched the album's mafioso narratives.
Portishead's Dummy cover is not an anonymous model photographed for a retro fashion shoot. The blue, blurry image is vocalist Beth Gibbons in a still from the band's own noir-tinged short film To Kill a Dead Man, carrying the group's cinematic world directly onto its 1994 debut.
Curtis Mayfield's blaxploitation soundtrack cover became as iconic as the film itself, featuring stark typography and street-level imagery that perfectly captured the gritty urban world of early 1970s cinema.