9 cover stories in our archive
Behind the Covers' archive includes 9 album covers documented under the "pre existing artwork" design theme, spanning the 1960s, 1970s, 1980s, 1990s, 2000s. These covers sit within the rock, indie, alternative, punk, jazz, pop, metal, folk, world, blues tradition and feature work by The Strokes, Beck, Beastie Boys, The Smiths 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 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 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.
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.
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 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 heraldic crest floats on pure white: two golden lions, a phoenix with outstretched wings, a flaming crab and two fairies guarding a crowned letter Q. It looks like royalty, but every creature on it is a hidden horoscope. Freddie Mercury, art-college trained, drew the band's zodiac into a coat of arms.
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 red, winged, tattooed angel points skyward over a conga drum while a naked dark-skinned Mary sits among flowers and a white dove. Carlos Santana spotted this painting in a magazine and demanded it for his band's 1970 album — and it ended up pinned inside a shaman's hut and a Rastafarian's truck worldwide.
A London store's mass-produced Hindu devotional poster became the frame for a rock band: Jimi Hendrix and his bandmates painted as arms of the god Vishnu, glowing in pink, orange and turquoise. Hendrix hated it. Decades later, a nation's censors seized copies. Here is the strange life of a cover its own star disowned.