18 cover stories in our archive
Behind the Covers' archive includes 18 album covers documented under the "surreal" design theme, spanning the 1960s, 1970s, 1980s, 1990s, 2020s. These covers sit within the alternative, indie, r&b, rock, hip-hop, pop, metal, electronic, world, funk tradition and feature work by Pixies, SZA, Red Hot Chili Peppers, Boston 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.
A topless flamenco dancer arches against a crumbling wall, a crucifix glinting beside her, a torn movie poster behind. Pixies' debut buries Catholic imagery, a broken guitar neck, and a strange tonal reversal into one sepia frame. The story of how it was built above a London pub in a single day is stranger than the photo.
SZA transforms into a shimmering insect creature for this deluxe reissue cover, shot by Cassidy Meyers. The bug persona originated from her Hot Ones appearance where she quipped about being 'tired of not being a bug.'
A surreal dream vision of a swimming pool where water becomes sky, creating one of alternative rock's most memorable album covers through a groundbreaking digital collage.
Before the guitar-spaceships, an album cover team seriously pitched Boston lettuce, Boston cream pie, and a pot of baked beans. What won instead was a fleet of upside-down guitars escaping a dying Earth, an optical illusion millions never caught until Reddit lost its mind decades later.
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.
Alan Aldridge's airbrush masterpiece drew inspiration from Hieronymus Bosch's Garden of Earthly Delights. Created with Harry Willock, the psychedelic artwork surrounds Elton John with mythical creatures in vivid detail.
Lil Nas X floats nude in this heavenly digital dreamscape shot by Charlotte Rutherford and designed by Pilar Zeta. The psychedelic cover transforms John Stephens' Genesis II artwork into a queer-coded Garden of Eden, sparking the rapper's bold artistic transformation and becoming one of 2021's most talked-about album covers.
Photographer Herb Greene captured Jefferson Airplane in an infrared dreamscape that perfectly matched their psychedelic sound. The otherworldly technique turned the band into ghostly figures floating through a surreal landscape.
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.
Nirvana's final studio album features anatomical collages by artist Robert Fisher that Walmart and Kmart refused to stock, forcing the band to create sanitized alternate covers for major retailers while the original became a statement of artistic integrity.
Tool guitarist Adam Jones created one of metal's most disturbing covers by combining stop-motion animation techniques with medical imagery and occult symbolism. The ribcage-like structure opening to reveal organs was inspired by his background in special effects for Hollywood horror films.
The Prodigy's breakthrough album cover featured a controversial crab design that record stores initially refused to stock. Designer Alex Jenkins created the unsettling crustacean imagery that perfectly matched the band's aggressive electronic sound.
Photographer Joel Brodsky created this surreal circus of street performers and jugglers in a single New York City shoot, but The Doors themselves are completely absent from their own album cover—a bold choice that made the artwork more mysterious than the band.
A face half-drowned in flowers and shadow, blurred to the edge of vanishing. The man behind The Cure's Disintegration never meant to be on its cover at all, yet there he is, seeping into the dark. Andy Vella built the whole image from Polaroids, projected and re-photographed until colour itself came apart.
Two businessmen shake hands on a sun-baked studio backlot, and one of them is on fire. Pink Floyd asked Storm Thorgerson how to picture people who hide their true feelings, and he answered: 'Set a man on fire.' A real stuntman, fifteen takes, and a singed moustache later, here's the result.
Chris Bilheimer's surreal illustration of a couple floating above the sea with a drum replacing one figure's head — inspired by a vintage postcard — connects to the album's hallucinatory exploration of Anne Frank, innocence, and historical trauma.
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.
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.'