19 cover stories in our archive
Behind the Covers' archive includes 19 album covers documented under the "color field" design theme, spanning the 1960s, 1970s, 1980s, 1990s, 2010s, 2020s. These covers sit within the hip-hop, soul, r&b, indie, electronic, alternative, pop, rock, punk, folk, jazz, funk, world tradition and feature work by Little Simz, Phoebe Bridgers, The Weeknd, Beach House 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.
Bathed in molten gold, Little Simz bends toward us over the back of a wooden chair, peering over the rims of her glasses in a checkerboard suit. The 2021 cover that announced Sometimes I Might Be Introvert went on to carry a Mercury Prize and a Brit Award sticker.
At 3 AM in a pitch-black desert, photographer Olof Grind painted the sand red with a flashlight and a gel filter while Phoebe Bridgers stood dead still in a skeleton suit, waiting to be beamed into the sky. The Punisher cover turns a 30-second exposure into a scene of cosmic abduction.
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.
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.
A saturated orange field, two sharply different typefaces and a few flash-like color spots give Frank Ocean's Channel Orange one of the most recognizable sleeves of the 2010s. The album artwork is credited to Thomas Mastorakos, Aaron Martinez and Phil Toselli.
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.
Janine Lindemulder poses as a nurse pulling on a blue surgical glove for Blink-182's Enema of the State cover, photographed by David Goldman for the band's deliberately clinical visual concept.
On 1 April 1995, Björk stood in Piccadilly Circus in a jacket made of airmail envelope paper, surrounded by giant postcards. The cover of Post turned homesickness into design: a woman trying to mail herself back to Iceland.
The debut Dave Matthews Band album points its camera straight up at a spinning swing carousel, blurring riders into streaks of motion against a bruised purple sky. Shot at an Ohio amusement park, it turns a childhood ride into something dizzy and dreamlike, exactly matching a title about being under the table and dreaming.
Trent Reznor gave a British collagist three words: attrition, wound, decay. Russell Mills answered with a two-foot panel built from plaster, rusted metal, dead insects, surgical bandages, and his own blood. The result stares back from The Downward Spiral like something scraped from a fevered wall.
Three faces float on a field of burning orange, calm and unblinking. TLC arrived on CrazySexyCool with vulnerability and bare skin instead of baggy hoodies, and the reinvention helped make them the first girl group to go diamond. Here's the story behind that stare.
Five faces pushed to the front of the frame, lit in a cold green wash, staring out with the flat calm of people who already know they're being overlooked. This is Slowdive's Souvlaki, a 1993 shoegaze record that limped to number 51, got tepid reviews, then quietly became a touchstone. The title came from a filthy prank call.
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.
A four-month-old baby swims naked toward a dollar bill on a fishhook — and decades later that baby would sue the band. The story behind Nirvana's 1991 cover runs from a TV program on water births to a censorship fight Kurt Cobain won with a single outrageous sentence.
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.
The first cover shot down was Michael Jackson in kids' clothes by a campfire. What replaced it: a tuxedo, a brick wall, and a smile cropped just below the eyes. Here's how Mike Salisbury and Steve Harvey turned a young singer into a star who looked like he'd already arrived.
A red, winged, tattooed angel points skyward over a conga drum while a naked dark-skinned Mary sits among flowers and a white dove. Carlos Santana spotted this painting in a magazine and demanded it for his band's 1970 album — and it ended up pinned inside a shaman's hut and a Rastafarian's truck worldwide.
Five Beach Boys, an enclosure full of hungry goats, and a title taken so literally it got the band reportedly banned from the San Diego Zoo. The Pet Sounds cover is a pun made flesh — and the sixth member couldn't even be in the photo.
A freezing February afternoon in Greenwich Village, a young couple walking arm-in-arm down a slushy street, and a photographer who admitted he had no real plan. The shot that resulted rewrote what an album cover could be. But the woman beside Bob Dylan was never named, and four songs vanished from the record just before it shipped.