16 cover stories in our archive
Behind the Covers' archive includes 16 album covers documented under the "monochrome" design theme, spanning the 1970s, 1980s, 1990s, 2000s, 2010s. These covers sit within the alternative, indie, folk, rock, hip-hop, soul, funk, r&b, metal, electronic, pop tradition and feature work by Neko Case, Death Cab for Cutie, Arctic Monkeys, Danny Brown 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.
Neko Case shot this haunting self-portrait in her own bathroom, creating one of indie rock's most striking covers with just natural light and a vintage Polaroid camera. The intimate DIY approach perfectly captured the album's themes of vulnerability and transformation.
The stark white cover of Death Cab for Cutie's breakthrough album features only minimalist typography, rejecting the era's typical indie rock aesthetic. This bold simplicity perfectly captured the album's themes of distance and isolation.
The cover features a blurry, candid photo of Arctic Monkeys' friend Chris McClure smoking in a nightclub, captured during their early Sheffield club days. This lo-fi snapshot perfectly embodied the band's working-class authenticity and DIY aesthetic.
Danny Brown's Atrocity Exhibition features stark, industrial artwork that mirrors the album's chaotic hip-hop experimentalism. The cover's brutalist aesthetic perfectly captures the Detroit rapper's descent into addiction and mental fragmentation.
Curtis Mayfield's blaxploitation soundtrack cover became as iconic as the film itself, featuring stark typography and street-level imagery that perfectly captured the gritty urban world of early 1970s cinema.
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.
The iconic silver robot head that launched Daft Punk's visual identity was actually created by unknown designers credited only as "Alex and Martin." This minimalist chrome dome became the template for electronic music's most recognizable brand.
The haunting cover of Slint's masterpiece was shot by musician Will Oldham at a local quarry, featuring the band members floating eerily in murky water. The image perfectly captures the album's unsettling atmosphere and became one of indie rock's most mysterious covers.
PJ Harvey's Mercury Prize-winning album features a haunting black-and-white portrait that captures the duality of urban grit and oceanic mystery. Photographer Seamus Murphy created an image that perfectly embodied Harvey's artistic transformation.
Jay-Z's Blueprint cover features a minimalist architectural drawing that became one of hip-hop's most iconic designs. The stark blue-on-white technical diagram perfectly matched the album's title while establishing a new standard for sophisticated rap album artwork.
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 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 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.'
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.