18 cover stories in our archive
Behind the Covers' archive includes 18 album covers documented under the "collage" design theme, spanning the 1960s, 1970s, 1980s, 1990s, 2000s, 2010s. These covers sit within the hip-hop, alternative, indie, folk, electronic, rock, metal, blues, pop tradition and feature work by XXXTentacion, Tyler, The Creator, Feist, Bright Eyes 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.
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.
Tyler, The Creator designed his own cover for Flower Boy, creating a vibrant polaroid-style collage that perfectly captured his artistic evolution from dark provocateur to colorful creative.
The gorgeous handmade collage adorning Feist's breakthrough album was created entirely from vintage paper cutouts and magazine clippings by designer Kosta Karakashyan, who spent weeks crafting the delicate bird and floral motifs without any digital manipulation.
Conor Oberst created this handmade collage using childhood photos, pressed flowers, and fragments of handwritten lyrics. The intimate assemblage was photographed and became one of indie rock's most personal album covers.
Designer Jonathan Zawada created a dreamlike collage of vintage airline imagery that perfectly captured The Avalanches' sample-based sound. The cover became an instant classic of early 2000s electronic music design.
Modest Mouse's breakthrough album features a haunting collage of Antarctic imagery and celestial elements that perfectly captures the band's existential themes. The cover's stark, fragmented design mirrors the album's exploration of isolation and cosmic insignificance.
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.
Pearl Jam's third album featured pages torn from an actual 1920s medical textbook, creating one of the most unique and disturbing covers in rock history. The band found the vintage "Vitalogy" book in a thrift store and used its bizarre medical illustrations to reflect their frustration with fame.
Nirvana's final studio album features anatomical collages by artist Robert Fisher that Walmart and Kmart refused to stock, forcing the band to create sanitized alternate covers for major retailers while the original became a statement of artistic integrity.
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.
Public Enemy's radical collage cover packed surveillance imagery, crosshairs, and militant graphics into a visual manifesto that perfectly captured hip-hop's revolutionary spirit. Designer B.E. Johnson created a chaotic information overload that mirrored the group's dense sonic assault.
Rick Rubin phoned a political illustrator who was drawing for the Village Voice and asked him to imagine hell. What Larry Carroll delivered was a three-foot canvas of goat-headed rulers and dangling bodies that Kerry King once dismissed as the work of a 'warped demented freak' before admitting it redefined metal.
A 40-foot helium pig named Algie floats between the chimneys of Battersea Power Station on Pink Floyd's 1977 cover. During the shoot it broke free, drifted into Heathrow's flight paths and grounded planes before landing in a Kent farmer's field. The image you see is a splice of two different days.
Peter Corriston spent weeks combing New York for the perfect tenement, then cropped out an entire floor so the buildings would fit a square sleeve. The windows of 96-98 St. Mark's Place became die-cut peepholes that could spell out a name and reveal everyone from Buzz Aldrin to Lee Harvey Oswald.
In 1968 Frank Zappa set out to make a photographic negative of Sgt. Pepper: thunderstorm instead of blue sky, dresses instead of uniforms, rotting vegetables instead of flowers. Then the Beatles' label got nervous, the packaging got flipped inside-out, and Jimi Hendrix showed up in person. Behind the lurid crowd lies a lawsuit-shadowed act of sabotage aimed straight at the summer of love.
A roadie's mispronunciation gave the album its name; a chance meeting in a nightclub gave it its face. Cream's Disraeli Gears wears a fluorescent collage built from a publicity photo, scissors, and paint mixed to capture a 'warm electric sound.'
The concept was born from Paul McCartney's idea that the Beatles would become an entirely fictional band. The cover depicts the band in colorful satin military uniforms standing in front of a crowd of life-size cardboard cutouts of famous figures.
Klaus Voormann's revolutionary black-and-white collage combines pen-and-ink drawings with photographs, using the Beatles' flowing hair to create a psychedelic masterpiece that won the first Grammy Award for rock album artwork in 1967.