9 cover stories in our archive
Behind the Covers' archive includes 9 album covers documented under the "gatefold" design theme, spanning the 1960s, 1970s, 1980s. These covers sit within the rock, metal, r&b, soul, funk, alternative, folk, jazz tradition and feature work by Rush, Elton John, Stevie Wonder, Emerson, Lake & Palmer 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.
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.
Stevie Wonder's double album featured an innovative fold-out cover with intricate African-inspired border patterns and symbolic imagery representing life's journey. The artwork's cosmic and spiritual elements perfectly matched Wonder's most ambitious musical statement.
Swiss surrealist H.R. Giger created his first album cover for this progressive rock masterpiece, featuring his signature biomechanical imagery that would later define the Alien film franchise. The gatefold reveals an intricate maze of organic machinery.
Four men stand grim against an endless Death Valley horizon, coats off in freezing cold so it would look hot. The story of U2's 1987 desert journey involves a working title called 'The Two Americas,' a lone tree found in 20 minutes, and a band picture that sent fans on pilgrimages still happening today.
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.
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.
John Coltrane stares into the middle distance, half in shadow, on the cover of A Love Supreme — a photo snapped by his own producer. Behind that quiet face was a four-part devotional suite cut in a single 1964 session that would outsell everything he'd ever done.
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.