> ## Content Index > Fetch the complete content index at: https://www.artbeforenoise.com/llms.txt > Use this file to discover other available public pages before exploring further. # Deep End - URL: https://www.artbeforenoise.com/album-covers-swimming-pools/ - Published: 2026-08-24T06:58:32.000Z - Updated: 2026-08-24T06:58:32.000Z - Description: Ten album covers featuring swimming pools. A Rolls Royce submerged by crane. An inverted sky. A hot older woman in heels. A donut on a fishhook. Water, leisure and the American dream on vinyl. - Author: Craig - Tags: The Playlist, The Motels, Def Leppard, Blur, Weird Al Yankovic, Red Hot Chili Peppers, Oasis, Deftones, Machine Gun Kelly, Post Malone, Brian Cannon, #toc There is something about a swimming pool that stops you cold. It promises leisure. It promises luxury. It promises a version of life where the most pressing decision is whether to get in now or wait until after lunch. Honestly, they are just fun, aren't they? And then you look at what musicians have done with swimming pools on their album covers, you realise the pool is rarely just a pool. It's a status symbol. A metaphor. A punchline. A crime scene. A mirror held up to the American dream and everything swimming beneath its surface. Here are ten album covers that got their feet wet. ![A boring, generic pool that has nothing to do with these albums.](https://images.unsplash.com/photo-1572331165267-854da2b10ccc?crop=entropy&cs=tinysrgb&fit=max&fm=jpg&ixid=M3wxMTc3M3wwfDF8c2VhcmNofDE0fHxzd2ltbWluZyUyMHBvb2x8ZW58MHx8fHwxNzgyNjI2MjI1fDA&ixlib=rb-4.1.0&q=80&w=2000) A boring, generic pool that has nothing to do with these albums. Photo by [Roberto Nickson](https://unsplash.com/@rpnickson?ref=artbeforenoise.com) / [Unsplash](https://unsplash.com/?utm%5Fsource=ghost&utm%5Fmedium=referral&utm%5Fcampaign=api-credit) --- ## 1\. The Motels - The Motels (1979) ![The Motels - The Motels album cover](https://www.artbeforenoise.com/content/images/2026/06/The-Motels---The-Motels-album-cover.jpg) We start at a motel pool in Los Angeles in 1979\. A hot, older woman stands confidently at the edge. Blue one-piece swimsuit. High heels. White-framed sunglasses. A cheerful expression that suggests she has absolutely no interest in your opinion of her choices. Photographer Elliot Gilbert photographed the band at a motel pool under the art direction of Roy Kohara and Henry Marquez, with neon-yellow typography applied by John Uomoto. The result is slightly surreal, completely charming and immediately distinctive; a New Wave debut cover that looked like nothing else on the shelves in 1979. The woman in heels by the pool is not explained. She is not introduced. She simply is. Which is exactly the right approach. Throw this album in to your collection - [Grab it on Amazon](https://amzn.to/3R2I1wt?ref=artbeforenoise.com). --- ## 2\. Def Leppard - High N Dry (1981) ![Def Leppard - High N Dry Album Cover](https://www.artbeforenoise.com/content/images/2026/06/Def-Leppard---High-N-Dry-Album-Cover.jpg) It's 1981\. Two years after The Motels sold their soul for [Total Control](https://open.spotify.com/track/6H1Kjxu2NlJCMxg0Pay0Rd?si=c0b3173db92d4c51&ref=artbeforenoise.com). In Sheffield. A professional diver caught mid-air above a swimming pool; body straight, form perfect, the water waiting below. Clean lines. Blue water. Early morning light. The cover spotlights a swimming pool diver, a leopard diving into it as compared to a professional diver as seen on the album's cover. The image is athletic rather than decadent. A pool as a place of discipline and precision rather than luxury and excess. For a band about to become one of the biggest rock acts on the planet, it's a surprisingly restrained visual statement. It would be the last restrained thing Def Leppard did for quite some time. Add it to your CD rack. [It's on Amazon](https://amzn.to/4wfonMI?ref=artbeforenoise.com). --- ## 3\. The Great Escape - Blur (1995) ![Blur - The Great Escape Album Cover](https://www.artbeforenoise.com/content/images/2026/06/Blur---The-Great-Escape-Album-Cover.jpg) Blur's fourth album arrived at the peak of Britpop. The summer of 1995, the battle with Oasis, Country House at number one. The cover shot from surface level of a pool, looking up at a woman in the moment of her dive, suspended between the world above and the water below. The title tells you everything the image is hinting at. [The Great Escape](https://amzn.to/4oPpMXM?ref=artbeforenoise.com). From what? From whom? The pool is a threshold, the moment before submersion, before the noise of the surface world disappears and something quieter takes its place. Damon Albarn was not having a great time in 1995\. The cover knows it. Side note: Don't worry. I didn't forget *The Ballad of Darren*. Keep reading! --- ## 4\. Weird Al Yankovic - Off The Deep End (1992) ![Weird Al Yankovic - Off The Deep End album cover](https://www.artbeforenoise.com/content/images/2026/06/Weird-Al-Yankovic---Off-The-Deep-End-album-cover.jpg) In 1991 [Nirvana released Nevermind](https://www.artbeforenoise.com/nevermind-nirvana-album-cover/); a naked baby underwater chasing a dollar bill on a fishhook. In 1992 Weird Al Yankovic shot his own version in the same swimming pool. However unlike the baby's clothing or lack thereof, Al wore a bathing suit that the perspective hid. Al stated that he intended the cover to show him wearing brightly coloured swim trunks but the photo was taken at an angle that made him appear naked. He decided to just roll with it. Instead of a dollar bill on a fishhook; a donut. In the same pool. As the same baby. Except it's Weird Al. Kurt Cobain saw it and reportedly laughed. Which feels just right. --- ## 5\. Red Hot Chili Peppers - Californication (1999) ![](https://www.artbeforenoise.com/content/images/2026/06/Red-Hot-Chili-Peppers---Californication.jpg) A swimming pool photographed from below. But the water is in the sky. The sky is where the water should be. The world has been flipped, or rather, reflected. It was like earth and heaven have changed places. The cover art features an inverted swimming pool, water above, sky below, creating a dreamlike, disorienting image that perfectly captures the album's themes of Hollywood excess and the seductive unreality of California. The pool itself belongs to [a family in the San Fernando Valley](https://maps.app.goo.gl/ypGcmNbaw91Anppr5?ref=artbeforenoise.com). The band's art director spent months driving around Los Angeles photographing swimming pools from below, keeping the images in a binder. This was the one. The specific pool was only recently tracked down by a geo-detective who spent considerable time matching the distinctive tile patterns visible in the image. The most photographed pool in rock history. And almost nobody knew where it was for twenty years. Dive in and grab a copy from [Amazon](https://amzn.to/4aqwtd3?ref=artbeforenoise.com). --- ## 6\. Oasis - Be Here Now (1997) ![Oasis - Be Here Now Album Cover](https://www.artbeforenoise.com/content/images/2026/06/Oasis---Be-Here-Now-album-cover.jpg) And now; the main event. The cover of [Be Here Now](https://amzn.to/3T7dVIH?ref=artbeforenoise.com) features a Rolls Royce Silver Shadow submerged in a swimming pool outside a mansion. One of the most gloriously excessive album covers of the Britpop era. The full story: A real Rolls Royce was lowered into a drained swimming pool by crane. The pool had to be filled by the fire brigade after the shoot drained the village's water supply. Guitarist Paul Benjamin "Bonehead" Arthurs was reportedly so intoxicated by the end of the session that he could barely stand. The shoot cost £75,000, plus an unpublished bar bill. The licence plate was changed to match the police van visible on the cover of [Abbey Road](https://www.artbeforenoise.com/album-covers-no-text/). The Rolls Royce was a tribute to Keith Moon, who famously drove one into a swimming pool. It was later sold for £1,500 and raced in demolition derbies. The album came out 2 years after Blur's The Great Escape. The battle of the pools, if you will. Blur won the race. But Oasis had a Rolls Royce. --- ## 7\. Blur - The Ballad of Darren (2023) ![Blur - The Ballad of Darren album cover](https://www.artbeforenoise.com/content/images/2026/06/Blur---The-Ballad-of-Darren-album-cover.jpg) Twenty eight years after The Great Escape (feeling old yet?), Blur returned with their ninth studio album, and another swimming pool. The Ballad of Darren cover was shot by legendary documentary photographer Martin Parr at Gourock Pool in Scotland, the oldest outdoor heated pool in Scotland, opened in 1909\. Where The Great Escape pool was warm and Californian, the Gourock pool is cold and Scottish. Grey skies, blue water, the Firth of Clyde visible in the background. Two Blur albums. Two pools. Twenty-eight years apart. The first one all Britpop ambition and heat. The second one: older, quieter, more honest about what it costs to still be standing. The pool hasn't changed. The band has. [Grab a copy](https://amzn.to/4pbEAQV?ref=artbeforenoise.com). --- ## 8\. Deftones - Around the Fur (1997) ![Deftones - Around the Fur album cover](https://www.artbeforenoise.com/content/images/2026/06/Deftones---Around-the-Fur-album-cover.jpg) Not a pool exactly. A jacuzzi. But the story earns its place. Doesn't it? The cover features a woman in a hot tub; warm water, relaxed pose, the intimacy of a private moment made public. It was shot at the band's rented condo in Seattle. Photographer Rick Kosick took two casual photographs and walked away not knowing either would become the album cover. Two photographs. One session. A rented condo. And one of the most distinctive covers in alternative metal history. Sometimes the best shots are the ones nobody was trying to take. Find it on [Amazon](https://amzn.to/4xTs3p0?ref=artbeforenoise.com). --- ## 9\. Machine Gun Kelly - Tickets to My Downfall (2020) ![Machine Gun Kelly - Tickets to My Downfall album cover](https://www.artbeforenoise.com/content/images/2026/06/Machine-Gun-Kelly---Tickets-to-My-Downfall-album-cover.jpg) The original artwork for MGK's pop punk breakthrough had to be scrapped at the last minute [due to a copyright issue](https://www.iheart.com/content/2020-09-08-machine-gun-kelly-forced-to-change-tickets-to-my-downfall-cover-art/?ref=artbeforenoise.com). What followed was one of the great emergency album cover shoots in recent history. MGK signed 13,000 copies of the wrong cover before an emergency photoshoot in a drained empty pool produced the final image. MGK with a guitar in an empty concrete pool, the absence of water making the whole thing feel raw and slightly desperate. A pool with no water. An album with no approved cover. Sometimes the constraints produce the best work. [Amazon has it](https://amzn.to/44ynjrj?ref=artbeforenoise.com). --- ## 10\. Post Malone - AUSTIN (2023) ![Post Malone - AUSTIN album cover](https://www.artbeforenoise.com/content/images/2026/06/Post-Malone-----AUSTIN-album-cover.jpg) And finally, the quietest pool on this list. Possibly the most boring? Post Malone sits by his swimming pool. Shirtless, blue jeans, feet dangling in the water, squinting directly at the camera. No Rolls Royce. No inverted sky. No donut. Just a man at the edge of his own pool, looking like he has something on his mind. AUSTIN marked a significant departure from Post Malone's previous aesthetic; dark, maximalist, produced by Studio Pending. This cover was deliberately simple. Deliberately personal. A superstar sitting by his pool like a person rather than a brand. The pool as a place of ordinary reflection. After everything on this list: the Rolls Royce, the jacuzzi, the woman in heels; sometimes a man just sits by his pool and thinks. That is also an album cover. Join [Post Malone](https://amzn.to/4xU2TXm?ref=artbeforenoise.com) by his pool. --- *Have a swimming pool cover I missed? Let me know in the comments. I have a feeling the water goes deeper than this...* ---