39 cover stories in our archive
Behind the Covers' archive includes 39 album covers documented under the "conceptual" design theme, spanning the 1960s, 1970s, 1980s, 1990s, 2000s, 2010s, 2020s. These covers sit within the alternative, indie, country, rock, metal, r&b, hip-hop, blues, folk, electronic, pop, soul, jazz, funk, punk tradition and feature work by Pixies, Morgan Wallen, Boston, Rush 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 topless flamenco dancer arches against a crumbling wall, a crucifix glinting beside her, a torn movie poster behind. Pixies' debut buries Catholic imagery, a broken guitar neck, and a strange tonal reversal into one sepia frame. The story of how it was built above a London pub in a single day is stranger than the photo.
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.
Before the guitar-spaceships, an album cover team seriously pitched Boston lettuce, Boston cream pie, and a pot of baked beans. What won instead was a fleet of upside-down guitars escaping a dying Earth, an optical illusion millions never caught until Reddit lost its mind decades later.
The red star glaring out of a field of stars almost cost Rush their record deal. Mercury nearly dropped the band, granted one last album, and got the one that saved them. Here's how Hugh Syme and Neil Peart turned a pentagram and a naked man into rock's most recognizable accidental logo.
A man in platform heels steps off a cracked brick wall and into a torn poster of Oz. Ian Beck built the whole scene up in pencil before slowly adding color, signing it in the corner. The road he walks won him the job, and it started with an Irish folk singer's record sleeve.
Frank Ocean's Channel Orange features one of the most deceptively simple covers of the 2010s - a pure orange rectangle with no text. The minimalist design was Ocean's own concept, rejecting traditional album artwork conventions to create something that felt more like a color swatch than a music package.
David Byrne created this stark, unsettling cover by photocopying his own face repeatedly until the image degraded into a haunting, pixelated portrait that perfectly captured the album's paranoid themes.
The haunting cemetery scene that graces Metallica's thrash masterpiece was shot at dawn in a San Francisco Bay Area graveyard, with designer Don Brautigam creating one of metal's most iconic images of control and manipulation through meticulous attention to the puppet strings stretching across endless white crosses.
A man in an oversized cream suit caught mid-motion, his head cropped clean off the frame by a black half-circle. Talking Heads turned a body in a too-big jacket into one of pop's most recognizable images, now hanging in MoMA. Here is the story behind the big coat.
Pearl Jam's second album features a stark black-and-white sheep photograph that became one of grunge's most minimalist covers. The band chose the image to represent conformity and mass mentality, creating an unexpectedly pastoral contrast to their heavy sound.
OutKast's groundbreaking sophomore album cover transformed the duo into literal aliens landing in Atlanta's skyline, visualizing their concept of being outsiders in both hip-hop and their hometown. The stark sci-fi imagery marked a bold departure from typical rap album covers of the era.
The Flaming Lips created their most iconic cover using simple pink lettering on white, letting the intriguing title do all the visual heavy lifting. This minimalist approach marked a radical departure from their previous psychedelic artwork.
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.
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 face half-drowned in flowers and shadow, blurred to the edge of vanishing. The man behind The Cure's Disintegration never meant to be on its cover at all, yet there he is, seeping into the dark. Andy Vella built the whole image from Polaroids, projected and re-photographed until colour itself came apart.
Kanye West sold one of 2013's most talked-about albums in a clear plastic case with a single piece of red tape slapped on it. There was no cover, on purpose. One collaborator called it an 'open casket' for the dying CD. Behind that emptiness sat a discarded George Condo painting, a scrapped title, and a charge of theft.
A heartbroken cartoon heart with one swollen eye stands alone on a golden dune while dolphins leap over a candy-pink sky. It became the year's best-selling album. The strange, tender story of how Bad Bunny's drawing turned into Un Verano Sin Ti.
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.
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.
On a cold, wet January night in 1972, a man stood alone under a furrier's sign in a London cul-de-sac, holding a borrowed guitar and pretending to be an alien. The black-and-white photograph that resulted was hand-painted into a sci-fi vision, and the shop owners were not amused.
A keyboardist asked for something as classy as a chocolate box. What he got was a beam of white light splitting into a rainbow against pure black, a design pulled from a 1963 physics textbook that would end up on more T-shirts than almost any image in rock. Here's how Pink Floyd's prism came to be.
She faces you head-on, hair scattered with dozens of half-clipped clips, mid-transformation and utterly still. Behind Solange's 2016 portrait is a partnership that began with a single Instagram discovery and grew into a statement about black women's solidarity.
A bare-skinned baby with a towering afro sits alone on white, and for 17 years nobody knew who he was. The mystery child on The Notorious B.I.G.'s 1994 debut was paid $150 for a two-hour shoot, and his face became one of hip-hop's most argued-over images.
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.
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 black-and-white house party erupts on the White House lawn, dollar bills fanned in fists, a baby cradled in the crowd, and a dead judge sprawled at everyone's feet. Kendrick Lamar's 2015 photograph turned the seat of American power into a stage for the kids he grew up with in Compton.
A picture frame holding a stooped old man bears no band name, no title, nothing, just a record so confident it dared customers to recognize it. For fifty years everyone called the image a Victorian oil painting. In 2023, the truth turned out to be stranger, and far more human.
A blizzard of white lines on a black field, this 1979 debut carries no band name, no title, nothing. The shape is actually a stack of radio pulses from the first pulsar ever found, and the man who plotted them had no idea his data had become one of rock's most copied images.
A single yellow banana on white, with an instruction to peel it. Andy Warhol's design for The Velvet Underground's 1967 debut sold poorly, sparked lawsuits decades later, and was once called the best album cover ever made.
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.
George Clinton called Pedro Bell an 'urban Hieronymus Bosch' who 'inverted psychedelia through the ghetto.' On Funkadelic's biggest album, Bell didn't just draw a cover — he built the visual myth of P-Funk itself, signing on as an 'electric marker heathen of speedomatic dabblings.'
To get this image, a designer bought a carp head from a fish market, hollowed it out, and made a singer hold the reeking thing to his face for over two hours. What stares back at you on this 1969 cover is half-man, half-fish, and entirely unforgettable.
A borrowed Tokyo studio, no time to plan, and a pose lifted from a German Expressionist painting: how a single frame shot by Masayoshi Sukita in April 1977 became David Bowie's "Heroes" sleeve, a face that still looms half a century on.
Kraftwerk turned a railway emblem into a swooping white bird against pure black, the TEE roundel resting where a heart might be. Behind the calm logo lies a scrapped mirror concept, two cities' worth of mannequin portraits, and a title track that would later power 'Planet Rock.'
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.
It looks like an X-ray of something that shouldn't exist: a curled human foetus with wings, glowing white against deep navy. The truth behind it is even stranger. One Icelandic artist drew the whole thing with a single Bic ballpoint pen, then flipped it into light.
David Bowie's final album cover shows no face, only a solid black star and a row of broken fragments. Designer Jonathan Barnbrook built it around mortality, hidden fields of stars, and a secret spelled out beneath the symbol. Bowie died two days after its release.
Janelle Monáe stares out from behind a veil of jewels, her face split between fevered red and cool blue, haloed by a burning sun. The 2018 cover for Dirty Computer caused an online explosion the moment it dropped. Here's why it stops you.
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.