75 cover stories in our archive
Behind the Covers' archive includes 75 album covers documented under the "conceptual" design theme, spanning the 1960s, 1970s, 1980s, 1990s, 2000s, 2010s, 2020s. These covers sit within the country, pop, electronic, indie, punk, alternative, hip-hop, soul, r&b, folk, funk, rock, jazz, metal, blues, reggae, experimental tradition and feature work by Morgan Wallen, Chappell Roan, Bad Bunny, Olivia Rodrigo 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.
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.
A red-haired figure in a tiara and a beaded pageant sash sits before a mirror rimmed with glowing bulbs, half queen and half construction. Chappell Roan built her whole persona as a character, and this 2023 debut turns a Missouri girl's leap to Los Angeles into a full-blown pageant fantasy.
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.
A bright purple wall, a defiant stare, and a tongue lettered S-O-U-R in real stickers: Olivia Rodrigo's debut turned a teenage diary into a cover you can't look away from. She picked every sticker herself, chasing a DIY zine feel that spilled across the whole campaign.
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.
A boy pedals a blue BMX straight at you while a car flies through a darkening suburban sky and a house burns behind him. On Bad Bunny's YHLQMDLG cover, look closer: there's a third eye in the middle of his forehead. This is the story of that eye.
In July 2020, with the world shut down, Taylor Swift vanished into a friend's woods with one photographer, no crew, and nightgowns ordered online. The black-and-white image she came back with shows her almost lost among the trees, a tiny pioneer figure swallowed by fog. The cover for folklore is a story about scale, solitude, and making art with whatever you have.
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.
A silhouetted figure in a leather jacket turns his back on the viewer inside a glowing archway, a sword and a skeleton at his feet. The image that fronts Post Malone's Hollywood's Bleeding was made by an artist he was already a fan of, and it looks less like a pop record than a fantasy paperback come to life.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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 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.
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.
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.
A maroon minivan sits on a cracked Compton street under a hard blue sky, bent slightly by a fisheye lens. It's the deluxe face of Kendrick Lamar's 2012 album, whose standard cover is a real family Polaroid: a toddler Kendrick on his uncle's lap, the adults' eyes blacked out, a 40-ounce beside a baby bottle.
That serene tropical island glowing under a starfield isn't a paradise. It's a mound of ocean trash, and to photograph it Gorillaz built a four-metre model and dropped it into a 50,000-litre water tank. Here's how a beach made of garbage became one of the prettiest sights of 2010.
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.
Two young men stand on a beach at dusk in feathers, war paint, and hot-pink shorts, a pale moon hanging between them. This is MGMT before the world caught on: a costume-shop fever dream shot during a music video, stamped with a logo Andrew VanWyngarden drew by hand.
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.
The US cover of The Strokes' debut isn't a hip in a leather glove. It's the wreckage of subatomic particles smashing apart inside a European physics chamber, an image that had already lived on a Prince record and a science book before it reached Times Square.
A young man stands dwarfed by a swirling black, red, and white mural on a Los Angeles sidewalk. Autumn de Wilde chose that wall because she'd loved it since childhood, calling it the ugliest mural she'd ever seen and then the most beautiful. After Elliott Smith's death in 2003, it became a shrine.
Radiohead's Kid A wears a range of barbed, snow-blasted peaks with fire pouring from their summits. Stanley Donwood painted those canvases with knives and sticks, and a Kosovo war photo of debris in snow lit the fuse. One late Oxfordshire night, too many cover versions were taped to a fridge until the right one announced itself.
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.
A two-lane highway runs empty toward the horizon while a red YIELD sign stands guard on the roadside. Pearl Jam's bassist shot it near his Montana home, and open the CD and the same road is drowning underwater. The image quietly announced that the band had stopped fighting.
The minimalist 3D rendered cover resembles the Atomium structure from the 1958 Brussels World's Fair. Dave Grohl joked the album cover almost featured a psychoanalyst's couch, reflecting the album's therapy session concept.
A small girl in a white dress stands alone on a pedestal while a giant faceless suit looms in the foreground, both branded with a single letter P. Portishead's 1997 self-titled album froze a frame from the 'All Mine' video into the most austere sleeve the band ever released, and the mysterious P logo began as an old Phillips badge.
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.
A shaggy Hungarian sheepdog frozen mid-leap over a hurdle became one of the strangest album covers of the 1990s. Beck picked the 1977 dog-show photo one day before deadline, and the record company's only reaction was relief the album would ship on time. Here's how a bundle of flying noodles ended up on Odelay.
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.
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 child's face glows red behind a Mason jar clouded with real flies, the band's name embossed backwards in the glass. The image traces back to Jerry Cantrell's third-grade science experiment, and to a photographer whose assistant kept refilling the jar from a horse stable because the flies would not stop dying.
Fans call it the 'Screaming Elf,' but that laughing face burning at the center of Soundgarden's Superunknown is Chris Cornell, flanked by two bandmates whose warped features look like flailing arms. Kevin Westenberg called the whole thing 'one glorious accident.' There was no plan that day, and one member got cropped out entirely.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
A topless flamenco dancer stands against a peeling wall hung with a crucifix and a torn poster for a Spanish film—an image born in a 'topless Spanish bar' and 'loaded with Catholicism.' This is the cover that helped launch a band, fed Kurt Cobain's blueprint for Nevermind, and now sits in the V&A.
A screaming, distorted face stares out from inside Def Leppard's triangle on 1987's Hysteria. Designer Andie Airfix reworked an entire eagle-lion-shark concept when the album's title changed, then split the art into nine secret panels that assembled into one giant mural.
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.
The young Marine staring past you never agreed to become the face of a vegetarian anthem. His helmet once read 'Make War Not Love.' Morrissey changed two words, cloned him fourfold like a Warhol print, and turned a Vietnam still into the Smiths' only UK number one.
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.
The Police's final masterpiece features striped portraits that weren't supposed to match but created an accidental optical illusion. Each band member was photographed separately, yet the lines align perfectly when placed together - a visual metaphor for synchronicity itself.
A jolly waitress named Libby hoists a glass of orange juice where the Statue of Liberty should hold her torch, and behind her Manhattan is built entirely from cereal boxes and cutlery, all spray-painted white. Supertramp's 1979 blockbuster turned a diner breakfast into the New York skyline and won a Grammy for it.
Pink Floyd's most stripped-down sleeve is a plain white brick wall. Behind it sits a feud, a fired design group, and a political cartoonist scribbling the title in red across a kitchen table in the South of France.
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.
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.
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.'
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.
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 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.
The Eagles wanted a classic California hotel rendered with a slightly sinister edge. To get it, two men dangled 60 feet above Sunset Boulevard on a cherry picker, shooting blindly into the sun. Almost nobody recognized the building they captured, and that was exactly the point.
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.
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.
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.
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.
Only 20,000 lucky buyers got Bob Marley's Island debut inside a working Zippo lighter that flipped open on a hinge. When that sleeve proved too expensive and too fragile, it vanished, replaced by the smoldering portrait most of the world now knows.
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.
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 grey concrete slab juts out of a coal slag heap, and four young men stand around it like primates confronting a mystery. The truth behind that pillar involves Stanley Kubrick, empty film canisters, and the fact that only one member of The Who could actually pee.
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 man charges through a black forest swinging a sword, his pink-and-yellow body smeared into three blurred ghosts. He was supposed to be a War Pig. Then Warner got nervous about Vietnam, the album became Paranoid, and the cover never got the memo.
When Decca wanted The Who's faces on the cover of Tommy, they cut tiny windows into Mike McInnerney's blue diamond-sphere and slipped the band inside. The result: a deaf, dumb and blind boy's world, pressed against the glass of an infinite cage.
In 1968 John Lennon set up a time-delay camera in a Marylebone flat and photographed himself and Yoko Ono fully nude for an album cover. EMI refused to touch it, 30,000 copies were seized as pornography, and the record had to be hidden inside a brown paper bag. This is what buyers were finally allowed to see.
In 1968 the world's biggest band handed record buyers a sleeve that looked like nothing at all: pure white, a whisper of embossed type, a serial number in the corner. Richard Hamilton's blank canvas was the deliberate anti-Sgt. Pepper, and it accidentally rechristened the album forever.
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.
The Doors are nowhere on their own second album cover. Instead, a strongman, a juggler and a dwarf perform in a Manhattan alley, because Jim Morrison flatly refused to pose. Look closely and the only sign of the band is a tiny poster taped to a brick wall.
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.
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.