25 cover stories in our archive
Behind the Covers' archive includes 25 album covers documented under the "collage" design theme, spanning the 1960s, 1970s, 1980s, 1990s, 2000s, 2010s. These covers sit within the hip-hop, alternative, rock, indie, folk, electronic, punk, metal, blues, pop tradition and feature work by XXXTentacion, Tyler, The Creator, Pixies, Kanye West 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.
Nearly three decades after he first gave Pixies a visual language at 4AD, Vaughan Oliver returned for Head Carrier with illustrator Ian Pollock and young designer Joshua Price. The orange, uncanny front cover combines lyric-driven imagery with handmade wooden lettering, making the reunion-era record feel connected to the band's past without simply imitating it.
The Life of Pablo's cover was designed by Belgian artist Peter De Potter, who turned repetition, family photographs and an abrasive orange field into an image that felt deliberately unfinished. Kanye West revealed the artwork on February 11, 2016, crediting De Potter directly. Its stacked typography and pasted-in photographs matched an album whose title, track list and even finished mixes kept changing in public.
For Busted Stuff, Dave Matthews Band turned the machinery of album promotion into the album cover itself: bassist Stefan Lessard sits beneath a wall of pasted posters carrying fragmented portraits of his bandmates. Danny Clinch photographed the scene, while Thane Kerner's digital collage work helped make the sleeve feel simultaneously like a street photograph, a band portrait and a poster campaign already coming apart at the seams.
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.
Refused treated The Shape of Punk to Come like a manifesto, and its sleeve was built the same way. Dennis Lyxzén handled art direction and layout, José Saxlund also worked on layout, David Sandström assembled the photo collage, and Ulf Nyberg and Axel Stattin supplied distinct photographic material for the package.
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.
Green Day followed Dookie's cartoon chaos with a darker visual world: Winston Smith's hand-built collage God Told Me to Skin You Alive. Original release credits distinguish Smith's artwork from Dirk Walter's art direction and David Harlan's typographic design, a creator chain the story preserves rather than flattening into a single generic design credit.
Ben Folds Five's debut looks less like a polished major-label campaign than something assembled around a piano: snapshots, handwritten marks and the instrument that made a guitarless trio such an anomaly in 1995 alternative rock. Alexandria Searls is credited for the album's photography. Thirty years later, the cover has fresh relevance as the band reunites around an expanded anniversary edition built from a long-lost first attempt at the record.
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.
It looks like a crime scene rendered as a logo: the word Suicide clawed out in blood-red letters above a splatter that drips down a stark field. Behind the sleeve of Suicide's 1977 debut is a two-man design job, and a rumor that the blood came from a fingertip.
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.
The front of Exile on Main St. is not a photograph of the Rolling Stones at all. It is Robert Frank's older image of a wall crowded with sideshow photographs, pulled from the world of The Americans and turned by John Van Hamersveld into the visual center of a deliberately rough, taped-and-pasted package that made the Stones look like fugitives from polished rock-star imagery.
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.