25 cover stories in our archive
Behind the Covers' archive includes 25 album covers documented under the "monochrome" design theme, spanning the 1960s, 1970s, 1980s, 1990s, 2000s, 2010s, 2020s. These covers sit within the indie, alternative, folk, rock, hip-hop, pop, country, electronic, metal, soul, funk, r&b tradition and feature work by Taylor Swift, David Bowie, Danny Brown, Beach House 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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
Half a face rises out of darkness beneath four towering white letters: CASH. It was the last album Johnny Cash released while alive, a record haunted by failing sight and closing time, its cover as stripped-down as the music inside.
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.
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.
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.
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.
Stanley Donwood's haunting medical dummy became Radiohead's visual identity by accident - the art student turned a college project into one of the 90s most unsettling album covers using photocopiers and anxiety.
A young woman leaving her band behind, pressing her hands together over her mouth as if holding in a secret or a prayer. Björk's Debut announces its title with a single unguarded face. Here is how Jean-Baptiste Mondino's portrait and Me Company's design framed a new beginning.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
Five bearded men stare out from a sepia haze, dressed like figures from a century they never lived in. Elliott Landy's portrait made The Band look like ghosts of American folklore, and for a while it was the only picture the public had of them.
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.