31 cover stories in our archive
Behind the Covers' archive includes 31 album covers documented under the "hand drawn" design theme, spanning the 1950s, 1960s, 1970s, 1980s, 1990s, 2000s, 2010s, 2020s. These covers sit within the country, indie, pop, hip-hop, alternative, rock, punk, jazz, funk, metal, reggae, blues tradition and feature work by Morgan Wallen, Bad Bunny, Post Malone, Chance the Rapper 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 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 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 hand-drawn children's book cover that broke industry rules by helping an independent mixtape win three Grammy Awards. Designer Brandon Breaux created crayon-style artwork that perfectly captured Chance's gospel-influenced sound and Chicago roots.
The golden fist and gun logo that became hip-hop's most recognizable symbol was hand-drawn by underground comic artist Nick Gazin in his cramped Brooklyn apartment. What started as a quick sketch became an iconic emblem that fans tattoo on their bodies and spray-paint on walls worldwide.
Artist Divya Srinivasan created the intricate illustrated cover depicting Illinois themes including Lincoln, Al Capone, the Sears Tower, and originally Superman—until copyright concerns led to multiple versions with balloons and eventually an empty sky.
Jack White drew inspiration from a 1960s circus poster to create one of rock's most playful covers. The vibrant red and pink elephant against stark white background perfectly captured the band's theatrical garage rock aesthetic while maintaining their strict three-color palette.
Frank Maddocks collaborated with the band to create this iconic stencil-graffiti soldier with dragonfly wings, inspired by Banksy. Mike Shinoda drew the original soldier illustration, while Maddocks executed the stenciling and added the wings.
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 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 man in dark sunglasses leans out a diner window clutching a phone, frozen in a 1964 photograph that Esquire never printed. Bruce Davidson shot it, forgot it, and thirty years later the Beastie Boys pulled it into daylight for an album about hip-hop, punk, jazz and funk crashing together.
East Bay artist Richie Bucher created this chaos-filled cartoon depicting dogs and monkeys flinging excrement from Berkeley rooftops, working only from the album title and his childhood associations with the word 'dookie.'
A cartoon dog dives headfirst into a doghouse marked BEWARE OF DOGG, drawn by Snoop's own cousin fresh out of jail. The image was so brazen that Congress hauled it into a hearing as evidence, and the album only sold harder for it.
The iconic cyclone-like design with a spark plug center was drawn by Big Chief guitarist Mark Dancey after a casual backstage invitation from Soundgarden members Kim Thayil and Matt Cameron in 1991.
The demonic skull adorning Danzig's debut was drawn by Glenn Danzig himself, but lifted from Marvel comic artist Michael Golden's cover for Crystar #8. The minimalist white skull on black background became one of metal's most iconic covers without any text or band identification.
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.
Metallica's electric chair artwork was created by band members themselves after their record label couldn't afford professional designers. The stark, hand-drawn imagery became one of metal's most recognizable covers despite being born from budget constraints.
Pink Floyd's most stripped-down sleeve is a plain white brick wall, no text at all on the original. 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.
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 Columbia producer heard it and snapped, 'It's a piece of shit! It's not produced.' Recorded cheap in a Garland, Texas studio with barely more than guitar, piano, and drums, Willie Nelson's spare murder-ballad concept album turned a dismissed 'demo' into the record that made him a superstar.
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.
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.
The iconic album cover for this reggae soundtrack featured artwork by John Bryant and sleeve design by London's CCS Associates. Bryant's vibrant illustration depicts Jimmy Cliff with dual pistols, using hand-drawn typography rendered in Bottleneck typeface with colorful gradients.
A candid band photo taken by Bob Fogerty shows CCR in an off-duty moment, complete with a handwritten 3RD GENERATION sign - a cheeky response to critic Ralph Gleason's dismissive review. The uncool, lumberjack aesthetic perfectly captured their working-class appeal.
George Hardie transformed Sam Shere's iconic 1937 Hindenburg disaster photograph into a haunting stipple illustration using a technical pen, creating one of rock's most powerful visual statements for just £60.
A screaming face fills every inch of King Crimson's 1969 debut: terror painted in pink, red and bruised purple. It was the only painting Barry Godber ever made, and he modeled the horror on his own face in a mirror. Months later, at 24, he was dead.
Underground cartoonist Robert Crumb created this hand-drawn comic book cover for just $600, turning down Columbia's slick photography concept. His whimsical cartoon style became one of rock's most beloved covers.
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.'
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.
One of the most infamous album covers ever created, featuring a 12-foot plywood Satan cutout designed by Ira Louvin and burning kerosene-soaked tires in a rock quarry. The brothers nearly got burned during the photo shoot when kerosene-soaked rocks exploded.
Frank Sinatra stands alone under blue streetlight, cigarette burning, fedora pushed back in resignation. Painted to mirror an album about loneliness and lost love, this 1955 cover plays like a film noir poster, and it would resurface decades later in Vanilla Sky, in a syringe-wielding parody, and in Kurt Elling's careful re-pose.