37 cover stories in our archive
Behind the Covers' archive includes 37 album covers documented under the "typographic" design theme, spanning the 1950s, 1960s, 1970s, 1980s, 1990s, 2000s, 2010s, 2020s. These covers sit within the hip-hop, soul, r&b, alternative, funk, pop, country, folk, indie, rock, electronic, punk, reggae, metal, blues, jazz tradition and feature work by Little Simz, XXXTentacion, Janelle Monáe, 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.
Bathed in molten gold, Little Simz bends toward us over the back of a wooden chair, peering over the rims of her glasses in a checkerboard suit. The 2021 cover that announced Sometimes I Might Be Introvert went on to carry a Mercury Prize and a Brit Award sticker.
A giant question mark, filled with fractured photographs and torn edges, floats on a clean white square while a screaming crowd presses in from every side. XXXTentacion's 2018 album ? turns a single punctuation mark into its whole identity.
Janelle Monáe stares out from behind a veil of jewels, her face split between fevered red and cool blue, haloed by a burning sun. The 2018 cover for Dirty Computer caused an online explosion the moment it dropped. Here's why it stops you.
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.
She sits alone on a wooden stool against a chalk-streaked black wall, hands clasped, gaze level and unflinching. The cover of Back to Black froze Amy Winehouse at the threshold of fame, in a Kensal Rise room the photographer called 'the black room'. Behind the calm pose sat an album built from real heartbreak.
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.
A young man stands dwarfed by a swirling black, red, and white mural on a Los Angeles sidewalk. Autumn de Wilde chose that wall because she'd loved it since childhood, calling it the ugliest mural she'd ever seen and then the most beautiful. After Elliott Smith's death in 2003, it became a shrine.
Radiohead's Kid A wears a range of barbed, snow-blasted peaks with fire pouring from their summits. Stanley Donwood painted those canvases with knives and sticks, and a Kosovo war photo of debris in snow lit the fuse. One late Oxfordshire night, too many cover versions were taped to a fridge until the right one announced itself.
A bald man stares you down against pure black, two fingers raised, gold on both wrists, tattoos crowding his skin. This was 2Pac's final album released while he lived, seven months before a drive-by ended everything. The stare on the cover feels like a dare.
The wind, the golden light, the level gaze: Shania Twain's 1995 breakthrough was shot by an unlikely photographer, the actor and director John Derek, with Bo Derek assisting. Behind that warm portrait sits a country record that sold 20 million and rewrote what the genre could sound like.
Three faces float on a field of burning orange, calm and unblinking. TLC arrived on CrazySexyCool with vulnerability and bare skin instead of baggy hoodies, and the reinvention helped make them the first girl group to go diamond. Here's the story behind that stare.
When MTV's producer looked at Kurt Cobain's set requests and asked 'You mean like a funeral?', Cobain answered 'Exactly. Like a funeral.' Seven months later he was dead, and the lilies and black candles on this cover stopped looking like staging and started looking like prophecy.
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.
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.
Two members of Run-DMC lean against a window in matching leather, the whole frame washed in violet and acid green. There was no grand concept behind one of hip-hop's defining 1986 covers, just a label that wanted the band on the front. Here is how a tilted camera and a borrowed eye for color turned that simplicity into something striking.
A man in an oversized cream suit caught mid-motion, his head cropped clean off the frame by a black half-circle. Talking Heads turned a body in a too-big jacket into one of pop's most recognizable images, now hanging in MoMA. Here is the story behind the big coat.
The white suit on the most recognizable man in pop music wasn't his at all — it belonged to the photographer, who'd simply worn it to work that day. The story behind Michael Jackson's Thriller cover is a small accident that helped shape an image seen around the world.
Four figures stand in a rain-slicked King's Cross underpass, shot by Pennie Smith the day The Clash wrapped a video. One of them is still wearing a helmet from the shoot. The band gave up royalties so this triple album could sell cheap.
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.
On 21 September 1979, a frustrated Paul Simonon swung his Fender bass at the floor of New York's Palladium — and Pennie Smith caught it. She thought the shot too blurry to use. Joe Strummer pointed at the contact sheet and said: 'That one.'
On the cover of Rumours, Mick Fleetwood strikes a courtly pose with wooden balls dangling between his legs. The story behind those balls, a toilet, and a couple of glasses of English ale, is stranger than anything the music suggests.
The Eagles wanted a classic California hotel rendered with a slightly sinister edge. To get it, two men dangled 60 feet above Sunset Boulevard on a cherry picker, shooting blindly into the sun. Almost nobody recognized the building they captured, and that was exactly the point.
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.
The red star glaring out of a field of stars almost cost Rush their record deal. Mercury nearly dropped the band, granted one last album, and got the one that saved them. Here's how Hugh Syme and Neil Peart turned a pentagram and a naked man into rock's most recognizable accidental logo.
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.
Peter Corriston spent weeks combing New York for the perfect tenement, then cropped out an entire floor so the buildings would fit a square sleeve. The windows of 96-98 St. Mark's Place became die-cut peepholes that could spell out a name and reveal everyone from Buzz Aldrin to Lee Harvey Oswald.
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.
Only 20,000 lucky buyers got Bob Marley's Island debut inside a working Zippo lighter that flipped open on a hinge. When that sleeve proved too expensive and too fragile, it vanished, replaced by the smoldering portrait most of the world now knows.
On a cold, wet January night in 1972, a man stood alone under a furrier's sign in a London cul-de-sac, holding a borrowed guitar and pretending to be an alien. The black-and-white photograph that resulted was hand-painted into a sci-fi vision — and the shop owners were not amused.
The face on Dolly Parton's 1971 cover isn't a glamour shot. It's a painted schoolboy-cut child in a patchwork coat of blue and rust, based on a photo snapped the same day young Dolly was teased for that homemade coat. The painting became the emblem of a song written on a dry-cleaning receipt.
Stare at the rose on the Grateful Dead's 1970 cover, then read the swirling script around it. It says American Beauty. It also says American Reality. The same letters, two meanings, deliberately built that way by two poster artists who turned a single word into a riddle.
When Milton Glaser built this 1969 cover, he wanted strangers to stop and ask 'What the hell is that?' The face staring back, half-lit and unblinking under a battered hat, belonged to an unknown songwriter whose name couldn't sell a single record. So Glaser sold the stare instead.
Three young men in aviator jackets and flight goggles stare out of a black void, their faces washed in unnatural blue and red light. It is Cream's 1966 debut, the first LP on Robert Stigwood's Reaction label, and the record that helped push blues into heavy, jamming new territory.
John Coltrane stares into the middle distance, half in shadow, on the cover of A Love Supreme — a photo snapped by his own producer. Behind that quiet face was a four-part devotional suite cut in a single 1964 session that would outsell everything he'd ever done.
A man caught mid-scream against a furnace of orange, mouth wide open, eyes shut tight. This was the cover of the first 12-inch LP a small label ever pressed, and the face belonged to rock and roll's loudest new voice. Here's the story behind Here's Little Richard.
A young man caught mid-howl, mouth wide, eyes shut, hammering an acoustic guitar in pink and green block letters. For nearly fifty years the wrong photographer got the credit for one of rock's most copied covers. Here's who really shot it, and why The Clash stole it.