# Art Before Noise > The secret history of album cover art. Deep dives, banned vinyl sleeves, visual mysteries, and the untold stories behind the artwork you love. Public Ghost content for AI and LLM tooling. This file includes a bounded export of public pages first, then recent public posts. Append `.md` to any post or page URL to get the content in Markdown (for example, `/example-post.md`). ## Pages ### About URL: https://www.artbeforenoise.com/about/ Last updated: 2026-05-12T11:19:14.000Z Hello and welcome to Art Before Noise. My name is Craig and let's just say that I am an older (gentle)man in my fifties, and I have had music on in the background (and the foreground) for as long as I can remember. From my first vinyl, cassette, compact disc, and now Spotify. All of it. All genres, all decades, all moods. Music has never really been background noise for me, it has always just been....there. But this blog isn't about music. It's about the thing you see before you hear a single note. The artwork. The cover. The art of the cover. That first impression that either pulls you in or leaves you cold before the noise starts. It's Art Before Noise. I've been staring at album covers my whole life. [*Unknown Pleasures*](https://www.artbeforenoise.com/unknown-pleasures-joy-division-album-cover/) by Joy Division. Those early Bowie albums where he graces the cover. *Revolver* by The Beatles, a personal fave and probably the best Beatles album ever. And, [*Maggot Brain*](https://www.artbeforenoise.com/maggot-brain-funkadelic-album-cover/) by Funkadelic. You know the one. These aren't just records to me, they're objects. Visual statements. Pieces of art. Sometimes the cover is the first argument the artist makes, and I find that fascinating. There used to be a blog called Sleevage that did something like this beautifully. It's gone now. I miss it. And, I don't think there's much out there on the internet that gives album cover art the attention it deserves. So here we are. This is my passion project. Art Before Noise will go deep on famous covers, shine a light on the overlooked ones, argue about controversial ones, and occasionally just celebrate the ones that stopped me in my tracks as I walked past that album sitting on the shelf. If you want to know more about the album cover sitting in your collection, then this could be the place for you. If you'd like new posts delivered straight to your inbox, you can subscribe to the mail list. No spam, just covers worth talking about. You can also find me on \[social platforms\] where I share thoughts, discoveries, and the occasional rabbit hole. Thanks for dropping by. Craig ### Archive URL: https://www.artbeforenoise.com/archive/ Last updated: 2026-05-02T12:55:33.000Z _No content available._ ### Directory URL: https://www.artbeforenoise.com/tags/ Last updated: 2026-05-03T05:56:09.000Z _No content available._ ### Blogroll URL: https://www.artbeforenoise.com/recommendations/ Last updated: 2026-07-17T13:36:21.000Z If you run a music-focused blog (especially on album art, design, or music history) and you’re open to a link swap, I’d love to hear from you. Reach out via [my contact page](https://www.artbeforenoise.com/contact/) with your site and a brief note about what you cover. ### Contact URL: https://www.artbeforenoise.com/contact/ Last updated: 2026-07-17T13:35:03.000Z Your Name Your Email Your Message Send message ## Posts ### A Poem On A Napkin URL: https://www.artbeforenoise.com/wheels-of-fire-cream-album-cover/ Last updated: 2026-09-01T04:11:45.000Z My parents had this album. I remember seeing it as a kid. That swirling, silver, slightly overwhelming image sitting in the record collection like something that had arrived from a different planet. Too strange to touch. Too intimidating to play. I left it alone and moved on to something less confusing. I came to Cream later in life. White Room. Sunshine of Your Love. The bass. The drumming. All of it remarkable. And then I went back to that cover, that cover that had intimidated me as a kid and had a good look at it for the first time. ![Cream Wheels of Fire album cover artwork designed by Martin Sharp featuring a dense, psychedelic black ink illustration of bubbling clouds, swirls, and abstract mechanical shapes against a reflective metallic silver foil background.](https://www.artbeforenoise.com/content/images/2026/06/Cream-Wheels-of-Fire-album-cover.jpg) | **Album** | *Wheels of Fire* | | ---------------- | ---------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------- | | **Artist** | Cream | | **Genre** | Rock | | **Released** | 14 June 1968 (US) / 9 August 1968 (UK) | | **Label** | [Polydor](https://www.artbeforenoise.com/tag/polydor-records/) (UK) / Atco (US) | | **On the cover** | A silver-grey psychedelic drawing on the front and back, with a matching Day-Glo version in orange, green, pink and yellow inside the gatefold | | **Design** | [Martin Sharp](https://www.artbeforenoise.com/tag/martin-sharp/) | | **Decade** | [1960s](https://www.artbeforenoise.com/tag/1960s/) | --- ## The Artist Nobody Talks About Enough Before we talk about the cover of [*Wheels of Fire*](https://amzn.to/4oTxYq1?ref=artbeforenoise.com) we need to talk about the man who made it. Because [Martin Sharp](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Martin%5FSharp?ref=artbeforenoise.com) is one of the most singularly talented visual artists of the 1960s and one of the least celebrated outside his native Australia. A native of Australia, Sharp was one of the people who established the legendary [underground magazine Oz](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Oz%5F%28magazine%29?ref=artbeforenoise.com), contributing a great many memorable and cheeky covers. In addition to designing the covers of Cream's second and third albums, Disraeli Gears and Wheels of Fire, Sharp also produced many iconic psychedelic artworks featuring the images of Bob Dylan, Mick Jagger, Jimi Hendrix, and Donovan, among others. ![underground magazine oz covers from the magazine](https://www.artbeforenoise.com/content/images/2026/06/oz-magazine-covers.webp) source: [https://boingboing.net/2016/02/26/scans-of-complete-run-of-oz-p.html](https://boingboing.net/2016/02/26/scans-of-complete-run-of-oz-p.html?ref=artbeforenoise.com) He was not, in other words, a hired gun brought in to illustrate someone else's vision. He was a genuine artist; witty, technically brilliant, and operating at the absolute centre of London's late 1960s cultural explosion. And he got the Cream job because of a poem he wrote on a napkin. --- ## A Poem On A Napkin A chance meeting at London's Speakeasy nightclub in early 1967 led to Cream guitarist Eric Clapton asking Sharp to create the cover to Cream's psychedelic masterpiece Disraeli Gears. "I just started chatting to Eric," Sharp told Classic Rock in 2003\. "I told him I had written a poem. He in turn told me he'd written some music. So I gave him my poem. Two weeks later he turned up with it on a B-side of a 45 record." The poem became [Tales of Brave Ulysses](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tales%5Fof%5FBrave%5FUlysses?ref=artbeforenoise.com), the B-side to Strange Brew and one of the defining tracks of the psychedelic era. Sharp wrote it on a napkin. Clapton set it to music in a fortnight. And the collaboration that produced two of the most celebrated album covers of the 1960s was born in a London nightclub over a casual conversation. Clapton moved Sharp into a studio apartment on London's trendy Kings Road and asked him to create a cover for Cream's next album. That apartment was [The Pheasantry](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The%5FPheasantry?ref=artbeforenoise.com), a remarkable Kings Road commune that at various points housed Germaine Greer, Anthony Haden-Guest and top rock photographer Robert Whitaker. [Robert Whitaker](https://www.artbeforenoise.com/tag/robert-whitaker/), the same photographer who shot the [Beatles Butcher cover](https://www.artbeforenoise.com/beatles-butcher-cover-yesterday-and-today/). The same Pheasantry. The same moment in London's cultural history. Art Before Noise keeps finding the same people in the same rooms. Why is that? ![Cream Disraeli Gears album cover artwork designed by Martin Sharp featuring a vibrant, fluorescent neon pink and orange psychedelic collage with dense floral swirls, a green-faced woman, and the stylized faces of Eric Clapton, Jack Bruce, and Ginger Baker emerging from the background.](https://www.artbeforenoise.com/content/images/2026/06/Disraeli-Gears---Cream-album-cover.jpg) Disreali Gears Cover, also by Sharp --- ## The Cover That Looks Like A Cliché To me, the Wheels of Fire cover looks like a psychedelic cliché. The swirling Op Art lines. The minimal colour palette: black on silver, with that foil finish. The sense of controlled visual chaos. These things look familiar now because everything that came after them borrowed from them. Martin Sharp wasn't following a template. He was creating one. The album was issued by ATCO in the United States during August 1968 as a double album with gatefold cover, and through [Polydor](https://www.artbeforenoise.com/404/) in the United Kingdom as two single albums. Martin Sharp's art featured on the front and rear covers of the majority of original releases, and within the inner gatefold section of the American release and later special re-releases. And the foil, that silver surface that makes the cover shimmer and shift depending on the light was not a standard printing choice. In the UK, the studio album was black print on aluminium foil, while the Live at the Fillmore album was a negative image of the studio cover. In Japan, the studio album was black on gold foil, while the live album was black on aluminium foil. Different versions. Different foils. Different countries. The same swirling Sharp artwork catching different light in different ways around the world. In Australia both covers were laminated copies of the Japanese releases. It was never released as a double album in Australia. The copy sitting in my parents' collection was a laminated Japanese pressing. ### Listen to Wheels of Fire by Cream [Wheels Of Fire (Expanded Deluxe Edition)Cream · album · 2026 · 63 songs![](https://www.artbeforenoise.com/content/images/icon/favicon32.b64ecc03-2296cc11-947a-4fc1-90c7-89920fe3a500.png)Spotify![](https://www.artbeforenoise.com/content/images/thumbnail/ab67616d00001e02386b06307a401e37105f2272-a966a0ea-3618-4641-b34a-cad356bb7ba3)](https://open.spotify.com/album/5wf3ZpbmLPb8BCp2ZZfiyh?si=9MFJiCqsSNij8IFNL9C4hQ&ref=artbeforenoise.com) --- ## The Prize Nobody Remembers Sharp won the New York Art Director's Prize for his design of Cream's Wheels of Fire. The New York Art Directors Prize. For Best Album Design. In 1969\. One of the most prestigious design awards of its era was given to an Australian artist living in a Kings Road commune in London, who got the job because he wrote a poem on a napkin in a nightclub. Sharp's draftsmanship and artistic flexibility are impressive, as is his irreverent wit. He was not hemmed in by the psychedelic genre the way many of his contemporaries were. His line work is precise and disciplined beneath the apparent chaos. The kind of technical control that takes years to develop and looks effortless once achieved. The Wheels of Fire cover won a prize that most people who own the record have never heard of. That feels right somehow. The best design is the kind that earns its place without announcing it. --- ## The Man Who Came Home Martin Sharp left London and returned to Australia in the 1970s. He proceeded to cement his reputation as the country's pre-eminent pop artist, holding numerous exhibitions of his work on canvas while continuing to engage in a steady stream of carefully chosen commercial jobs. He died in Sydney in December 2013 at the age of 71\. The obituaries were warm but brief. The fate of artists who work in the commercial space between fine art and popular culture, never quite belonging fully to either world. He wrote a poem on a napkin. He lived in a commune with Germaine Greer. He designed two of the most celebrated album covers of the psychedelic era. He won the New York Art Directors Prize. And he went home to Sydney and kept working quietly until the end. Australia doesn't always celebrate its own. Martin Sharp deserved better than the footnote he has largely become. --- ## Not A Cliché. A Blueprint. I understand now why that album sat in my parents' collection looking too strange to touch. It was strange in the best possible way. Strange in the way that genuinely new things always are before the world catches up with them. The swirling lines. The silver foil. The minimal palette. These things look like the 1960s because they helped define what the 1960s looked like. Martin Sharp didn't arrive late to a party. He helped set the table. White Room. Sunshine of Your Love. The bass. The beats. All remarkable. I should have dived in earlier. ### Almost Looks Like It Means Something URL: https://www.artbeforenoise.com/ok-computer-radiohead-album-cover/ Last updated: 2026-08-30T12:08:16.000Z What does the OK Computer cover have to do with the name of the album? A road junction. Blurred figures. White space. What appears to be a lost child poster. Fragments of text that almost resolve into meaning and then don't. It looks like something important is being said. But what? It comes from [Stanley Donwood](https://www.stanleydonwood.com/?ref=artbeforenoise.com) himself, who designed the cover with Thom Yorke. A newspaper review of the artwork described it as: *"It almost looks like it means something."* Donwood's response? *"Which I thought was fucking brilliant."* That is the OK Computer cover in a single exchange. An image that almost looks like it means something. Designed by two people who were processing something they couldn't fully articulate. About a world moving too fast. About technology and highways and the dehumanising hum of modern life. ![Radiohead - OK Computer album cover](https://www.artbeforenoise.com/content/images/2026/06/Radiohead---OK-Computer-album-cover.jpg) ## Album Anatomy | **Album** | *OK Computer* | | ---------------- | ----------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------- | | **Artist** | [Radiohead **Genre**](https://www.artbeforenoise.com/tag/radiohead/)[Alternative **Released**16 June 1997 **Label**](https://www.artbeforenoise.com/tag/alternative/)[Parlophone](https://www.artbeforenoise.com/tag/parlophone-records/) | | **On the cover** | A bleached, fogged-out motorway interchange, scratched over with stick figures, scrawled text and found-image fragments | | **Design** | [Stanley Donwood](https://www.artbeforenoise.com/tag/stanley-donwood/), with Thom Yorke (as "the White Chocolate Farm") | | **Decade** | [1990s](https://www.artbeforenoise.com/tag/1990s/) | | **Buy** | [Amazon](https://amzlink.to/az0gswBN5k8TX?ref=artbeforenoise.com) | --- ## Two Art Students At Exeter The story of the OK Computer cover begins not in a recording studio but in a university corridor. Stanley Donwood met Thom Yorke while they were both studying art at Exeter University. Donwood's first impression of Yorke was characteristically blunt; he seemed *"mouthy, pissed off, someone I could work with."* That assessment turned out to be accurate on all three counts. Yorke went on to become one of the most celebrated musicians of his generation. Donwood went on to design every Radiohead album cover from The Bends onwards, including the bleak, scratchy roadscape for OK Computer and the landfill heap of coloured word blocks on Hail to the Thief. It is widely known that Stanley Donwood is heavily involved throughout the band's recording process, working on artwork as the songs unfold. He is not brought in to simply draw some interesting pictures afterwards. He is an integral part of the whole process. That matters enormously for understanding the OK Computer cover. This is not a designer handed a finished album and asked to illustrate it. This is a collaborator who was present as the music was being made, absorbing the same anxieties, processing the same feelings, reaching for the same images. ### Listen to OK Computer by Radiohead [OK ComputerRadiohead · album · 1997 · 12 songs![](https://www.artbeforenoise.com/content/images/icon/favicon32.b64ecc03-be84e0a4-d161-4acc-b656-42a7a1a041f7.png)Spotify![](https://www.artbeforenoise.com/content/images/thumbnail/ab67616d00001e02c8b444df094279e70d0ed856-1b024943-d7b0-4bf8-a8ae-fbfeaa1b2cba)](https://open.spotify.com/album/6dVIqQ8qmQ5GBnJ9shOYGE?si=bo9pBCxMSSWE16cxgWqr9w&ref=artbeforenoise.com) --- ## A Hotel Room In Hartford The artwork is based partly around photographs Thom Yorke took of motorways and a highway interchange in Connecticut. Radiohead were on tour in America in 1996, one of the last live runs before returning to the UK to record OK Computer and something about the American highway system was getting under Yorke's skin. Fans eventually pieced together the specific location. After posting images on an [AARoads forum](https://www.aaroads.com/forum/index.php?topic=20215.msg2225006&ref=artbeforenoise.com#msg2225006), eagle-eyed road enthusiasts identified the interchange as Hartford, Connecticut's I-84 to I-90 connector. The band performed at Hartford's outdoor venue The Meadows on August 20th 1996 and the exact angle of the photo would place the photographer in a Hilton hotel room. ![radiohead album cover image](https://www.artbeforenoise.com/content/images/2026/06/radiohead-album-cover-image.webp) Image via [https://www.mentalfloss.com/entertainment/music/fans-discover-mystery-highway-cover-radioheads-ok-computer](https://www.mentalfloss.com/entertainment/music/fans-discover-mystery-highway-cover-radioheads-ok-computer?ref=artbeforenoise.com) A hotel room in Hartford. A tour stop on August 20th 1996\. Thom Yorke looking out of a Hilton window at an American highway interchange and photographing what he saw. That photograph was blurred, processed, and combined with Donwood's hand-drawn elements became one of the most recognisable album covers of the 1990s. Yorke later described that period as *"an odd time for me personally... of living in a bubble... touring endlessly... feeling like everything was moving too fast."* The highway outside the hotel window was a perfect visual metaphor for exactly that feeling; constant movement, constant noise, nobody going anywhere that matters. --- ## The Making Of The Image The artwork to OK Computer features a combination of computer-generated images by Thom Yorke and hand-drawn artwork by Donwood. Yorke worked on the digital elements. Donwood worked on the drawn elements. The two were combined into something that sits uncomfortably between the mechanical and the human, which is precisely where the album's themes live. Working with a palpable motif, Donwood blurred the lines with artistic abstraction, tailoring a chromatic palette to the mood of the music. In Radiohead's case, these are usually somewhat bleak pictures. The palette for OK Computer is almost entirely white, which makes the blurred road junction and the scattered figures feel even more isolated. They are details adrift in a vast emptiness. Small human presences in a world dominated by infrastructure. Yorke's own description of what the artwork means is one of the most honest things ever said about an album cover: *"Someone's being sold something they don't really want, and someone's being friendly because they're trying to sell something. That's what it means to me. All the artwork… it was all the things that I hadn't said in the songs."* The things he hadn't said in the songs. The cover as overflow. As the residue of everything that didn't make it into the music. --- ## What You're Actually Looking At The road is a highway interchange in Hartford, Connecticut, photographed from a hotel window on a tour stop in 1996\. It represents the relentless, dehumanising movement of modern life; the infrastructure that connects everyone and connects nobody. The blurred figures are people rendered almost invisible by the speed and scale of the world around them. Not a lost child poster, though the instinct to see one says something interesting about how the image works on you. The white space is not emptiness. It is the digital world, the OK Computer of the title, pressing in on the human figures, making them smaller, making them less distinct. And the name? [OK Computer](https://amzlink.to/az0gswBN5k8TX?ref=artbeforenoise.com) is a phrase of resigned acceptance; the *okay* you type into a machine when you want it to do something. A surrender to the technological world. The cover shows you what that world looks like from the outside; a highway, some figures, the hum of infrastructure, and the overwhelming white of screens and data and noise. > When Yorke and Donwood finished the artwork, Yorke described it as *"a quite good full stop over that period. It's like: that's what it was like. Even though it's sort of nonsense, for some reason it said what we needed to say."* --- ## The Pink Floyd Connection One final detail worth knowing and it connects directly to another post on this blog. One of the inner sleeves shows a silhouette of two males, seen as a link to the two businessmen on the cover of [Wish You Were Here](https://artbeforenoise.com/wish-you-were-here-pink-floyd-album-cover?ref=artbeforenoise.com). And on the other inner sleeve is a drawing of a pig, a clear link to [Pink Floyd's Animals](https://www.artbeforenoise.com/best-album-covers-1970s/). --- ## Almost Looks Like It Means Something I didn't understand the OK Computer cover when I first encountered it. A road. Some blurred figures. White space. Now I do. It is a photograph taken from a hotel window in Hartford, Connecticut, on August 20th 1996, by a man who was feeling like everything was moving too fast. Processed, combined with hand-drawn elements, and printed on a white background that represents the digital world pressing in on all of us. It almost looks like it means something. It means everything. ### Deep End URL: https://www.artbeforenoise.com/album-covers-swimming-pools/ Last updated: 2026-08-24T06:58:32.000Z 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...* --- ### The Music Was Always Better Than The Cover URL: https://www.artbeforenoise.com/kylie-minogue-album-covers/ Last updated: 2026-08-30T12:03:59.000Z ![10 of the best Kylie Minogue album covers](https://www.artbeforenoise.com/content/images/2026/06/10-of-the-best-Kylie-Minogue-Album-Covers.png) I grew up in Australia watching Kylie Minogue play Charlene in Neighbours. She was the mechanic next door who married Scott Robinson in front of twenty million viewers and then became one of the most enduring pop icons on the planet. I love Kylie. I have always loved Kylie. And, I hate Jason Donovan. But here is the thing nobody really talks about. For an artist of her extraordinary stature; 80 million records sold, number ones in five consecutive decades, Glastonbury Legends slot, Las Vegas residency, her album covers are remarkably inconsistent. Some are genuinely brilliant. Some are perfectly fine. And some make you wonder whether anyone in the room asked the question that Art Before Noise asks about every record: does the cover do justice to what's inside? Here are ten of her seventeen (yes, seventeen!!) studio albums and what their covers say about one of pop's greatest ever careers. --- ## Kylie (1988) ![Kylie Minogue - Self Titled Album Cover](https://www.artbeforenoise.com/content/images/2026/06/Kylie-Minogue---Self-Titled-Album-Cover.jpg) The debut. A young woman from Melbourne with a megawatt smile, shot against a pink background in what appears to be a slightly chaotic styling session. The look is pure late 80s; big hair, layered jewellery, a slightly uncertain expression that suggests she wasn't entirely sure what was happening either. [Kylie](https://amzn.to/4vL2aFU?ref=artbeforenoise.com) is not a sophisticated cover. It was never meant to be. Stock Aitken Waterman compared their business model to Motown (production line pop for a mass market) and the cover reflects exactly that. A product. A pretty face. A debut. What's inside is considerably more charming than the packaging suggests. I Should Be So Lucky remains one of the great pop singles. The cover sold it short from day one. --- ## Rhythm of Love (1990) ![Kylie Minogue - Rhythm of Love Album Cover](https://www.artbeforenoise.com/content/images/2026/06/Kylie-Minogue---Rhythm-of-Love-Album-Cover.jpg) Now we're talking. The third album marked a significant shift for Kylie, a more club-orientated sound, a highly sexual look and provocative music videos. The cover reflects that shift immediately. A closer, more confident crop. Less bubblegum. More intention. It's not groundbreaking but it's a genuine step forward; Kylie presenting herself as something more than the girl next door. Better The Devil You Know was the album's centrepiece and the cover, for the first time, felt like it was keeping pace with the music inside. --- ## Kylie Minogue (1994) ![Kylie Minogue - Self Titled Kylie Minogue Album Cover](https://www.artbeforenoise.com/content/images/2026/06/Kylie-Minogue---Self-Titled-Kylie-Minogue-Album-Cover.jpg) The reinvention. Having left PWL and signed to Deconstruction; an indie dance label known for creative risk, Kylie needed a cover that announced the change. Charles Shaar Murray of The Daily Telegraph suggested the artwork shows two different sides of Minogue, an intelligent modern woman with deep desires. Shot by [Ellen von Unwerth](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ellen%5Fvon%5FUnwerth?ref=artbeforenoise.com), the cover is striking, confident and genuinely different from anything she had done before. A [woman in a formal suit](https://www.artbeforenoise.com/horses-patti-smith-album-cover/) in a lascivious pose, the tension between the two is exactly the point. By subtly adding Minogue's surname to the title, as well as her formal outfit and lascivious pose on the cover, she successfully announced the arrival of a more sophisticated artist who wanted to be taken seriously. One of her best covers. Criminally overlooked. --- ## Impossible Princess (1997) ![Kylie Minogue - Impossible Princess Album Cover](https://www.artbeforenoise.com/content/images/2026/06/Kylie-Minogue---Impossible-Princess-Album-Cover.jpg) Here is where opinions divide sharply. The [Impossible Princess](https://amzn.to/4e8BARo?ref=artbeforenoise.com) cover features Kylie photographed in a stark, angular, slightly confrontational style; dark hair, challenging expression, nothing like the pop princess the world thought it knew. It was shot by [Stephane Sednaoui](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/St%C3%A9phane%5FSednaoui?ref=artbeforenoise.com) and deliberately referenced the indie and alternative world Kylie was exploring musically with collaborators including the Manic Street Preachers. Some fans consider it the best cover of her career. One reviewer declared it "the best album cover of all time. No notes. Perfection. Get it on a t-shirt, put it in a gallery." Others find it cold and slightly alienating, which was also the criticism of the album at the time. It flopped commercially and only found its audience years later. The cover, like the music, was ahead of where the audience was in 1997. --- ## Light Years (2000) ![Kylie Minogue - Light Years Album Cover](https://www.artbeforenoise.com/content/images/2026/06/Kylie-Minogue---Light-Years-Album-Cover.jpg) The comeback. After the commercial disappointment of *Impossible Princess*, Kylie moved to Parlophone and made a deliberate return to her pop roots. The [Light Years](https://amzn.to/4e7CFc8?ref=artbeforenoise.com) cover was shot by photographer Vincent Peters outside a villa at the far north of Ibiza Island. Kylie striking a pose with the sun piercing through behind her; warm, golden, glamorous. The whole image has the quality of a perfect Ibiza evening. She's not looking at you. She doesn't need to. The light does the work. It's not adventurous. It's not trying to be. It remains one of Kylie's most cohesive albums, right through from the sun-drenched artwork to the carefully curated songs, it's an expertly crafted piece of work absolutely bursting with pop hooks. The cover says: I'm back. I'm having fun. The sun is out. Come with me. It did exactly what it needed to do. --- ## Fever (2001) ![Kylie - Fever Album Cover](https://www.artbeforenoise.com/content/images/2026/06/Kylie---Fever-Album-Cover.jpg) The greatest album of her career. And the cover to match. Shot by Nick Knight, the same photographer who shot [Massive Attack's Mezzanine beetle](https://www.artbeforenoise.com/massive-attack-album-covers/), the Fever cover is a [masterpiece of minimalism](https://www.artbeforenoise.com/album-covers-no-text/). Kylie in white against a white background, her hair slicked back, her expression cool and slightly unreachable. No clutter. No excess. Just presence. [Fever](https://amzn.to/4onE6Xc?ref=artbeforenoise.com) remains her best cover. It is the cover that most perfectly captures who Kylie Minogue is at her best; elegant, precise, effortlessly cool, quietly extraordinary. Can't Get You Out of My Head was the song that defined 2001\. The cover defined it too. --- ## Body Language (2003) ![Kylie - Body Language Album Cover](https://www.artbeforenoise.com/content/images/2026/06/Kylie---Body-Language-Album-Cover.jpg) A genuinely interesting cover. Kylie shot in a warm, slightly retro aesthetic that perfectly matched the R&B influenced sound inside. The styling is confident and the image has a quiet glamour that suits the album's tone. It's not as iconic as Fever but it's a solid, considered piece of work. Slow is one of the great pop singles of the 2000s. The cover, for once, kept pace. --- ## X (2007) ![Kylie X Album Cover](https://www.artbeforenoise.com/content/images/2026/06/Kylie-X-Album-Cover.jpg) And here is where things get complicated. Released after Kylie's breast cancer diagnosis and treatment; she was diagnosed with breast cancer in 2005, forcing her to postpone all recording commitments. [X](https://amzn.to/4xq8dBz?ref=artbeforenoise.com) was a triumphant return that deserved a cover equal to its emotional weight. What it got was a slightly awkward shoot that feels caught between two ideas. The styling is elaborate but the image lacks the clean confidence of Fever or the boldness of Impossible Princess. It's a cover that tried too hard and landed somewhere in the middle. Interestingly, INXS released X in 1990\. Minogue dated [INXS front man, Michael Hutchence](https://www.artbeforenoise.com/inxs-kick-album-cover/), from 1989 to 1991\. Coincidence? Tribute? Only Kylie knows. --- ## Aphrodite (2010) ![Kylie Aphrodite Album Cover](https://www.artbeforenoise.com/content/images/2026/06/Kylie-Aphrodite-Album-Cover.png) The [Aphrodite](https://amzn.to/4oAxXHl?ref=artbeforenoise.com) cover leans fully into Greek goddess mythology. Kylie in flowing white robes, the name in classical typography, the whole thing suggesting something timeless and elevated. It's a coherent visual concept and it matches the euphoric, anthem-heavy music inside beautifully. Was there ever a move as powerful as when Kylie unleashed All the Lovers on the world? The cover, to its credit, promises exactly that kind of grandeur. And for once, the album delivers on what the cover promises. --- ## Tension (2023) ![Kylie Tension Album Cover](https://www.artbeforenoise.com/content/images/2026/06/Kylie-Minogue---Tension-Album-Cover.jpg) Twenty five years after Fever and Kylie Minogue is having one of the most unlikely late-career moments in pop history. Padam Padam went viral on TikTok. A new generation discovered her. And the [Tension](https://amzn.to/3QEDi3N?ref=artbeforenoise.com) cover; Kylie in a sleek, minimal shoot that recalls the best of her Fever era, is one of the strongest of her recent career. Tension debuted at number one on the UK and ARIA albums charts, with the viral single Padam Padam driving substantial streaming growth. The cover is clean, confident and completely assured; a woman who has nothing left to prove and knows it. It is, perhaps fittingly, the most Fever-adjacent cover she has made since Fever itself. Some lessons take twenty years to learn. The best ones are worth the wait. --- *Note: Kylie has released seventeen studio albums in total. This post focuses on ten of the most visually interesting. Her full discography, including Enjoy Yourself, Let's Get To It, Golden,* [*Disco*](https://amzn.to/4xhyIce?ref=artbeforenoise.com) *and* [*Tension II*](https://amzn.to/4xnXzLy?ref=artbeforenoise.com)*, deserves your attention even where the covers don't.* ### Da Inner Sound, Y'all URL: https://www.artbeforenoise.com/3-feet-high-and-rising-de-la-soul-album-cover/ Last updated: 2026-08-30T11:58:34.000Z I came to *3 Feet High and Rising* backwards. My first De La Soul album was *De La Soul Is Dead;* the darker, more confrontational second album. After listening to that, I needed to find the debut. I didn't know any of the songs. I didn't know what to expect. And then I played it. And understood immediately why this is one of the great albums. Every song remarkable. The chill. The warmth. The wit. The completely distinctive world that De La Soul had built and invited you inside. But before I heard any of it, I saw the cover. Three men lying on their backs, heads forming a triangle, looking up at a camera held by someone hanging off a step ladder. Bright hand drawn daisies layered over a black and white photograph. Colours that shouldn't work together somehow working perfectly. I really want one of those daisies tattooed somewhere on my arm. ![De La Soul - 3 Feet High and Rising album cover](https://www.artbeforenoise.com/content/images/2026/06/De-La-Soul---3-Feet-High-and-Rising-Album-Cover.jpg) | **Album** | *3 Feet High and Rising* | | ---------------- | ---------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------- | | **Artist** | De La Soul | | **Genre** | Hip-Hop | | **Released** | 6 February 1989 | | **Label** | [Tommy Boy Records](https://www.artbeforenoise.com/tag/tommy-boy-records/) | | **On the cover** | A black-and-white portrait of the trio overlaid with brightly coloured, hand-drawn Day-Glo flowers and lettering | | **Design** | [Grey Organisation (Toby Mott)](https://www.artbeforenoise.com/tag/grey-organisation/) | | **Decade** | [1980s](https://www.artbeforenoise.com/tag/1980s/) | --- ## Minnie Mouse and a Nightgown Before we talk about the cover we need to talk about the daisies. Because the daisies are everything and they started somewhere nobody expected. According to Posdnous, the group coined the term "the daisy age" after they noticed a nightgown in a store that had a picture of Minnie Mouse holding a daisy on it. A Minnie Mouse nightgown. In a shop window. That is where the Daisy Age began. D.A.I.S.Y. stood for Da Inner Sound Y'all. The Daisy Age referenced and paid homage to the flower children of the 1960s who pushed for social change while re-interpreting the ideas of social awareness and activism for a new age. Three young men from Long Island; Posdnous, Trugoy the Dove, and P.A. Pacemaster Mase saw a Minnie Mouse nightgown, thought of daisies, built a philosophy around them, named that philosophy with an acronym, and put it on one of the most important debut albums in hip hop history. The cover was always going to have daisies on it. That was never in question. The question was how. --- ## The Grey Organisation and the Step Ladder The answer came from an unlikely source. The album's artwork was designed by [Toby Mott](https://www.artbeforenoise.com/tag/toby-mott/) of the British art collective the Grey Organisation, who had relocated to New York City after their [attack on Cork Street's art galleries](https://corkstgalleries.com/articles/grey-organisation-cork-street-attack/?ref=artbeforenoise.com) and subsequent prosecution. Let's pause on that for a moment. The people who designed the 3 Feet High and Rising cover had recently been prosecuted for attacking London's most prestigious gallery district and had fled to New York. They were living in a loft on Grand and Centre Street in lower Manhattan, where (in Mott's own words) the rent was cheap but there were rats on the staircase. Mott heard De La Soul's debut twelve inch promo at the [Tommy Boy Records](https://www.artbeforenoise.com/404/) office and knew immediately. In his own words: "I put the record on the turntable and have to play it at full volume; it's so low fi, it sounds dusted. This is not Bring the Noise Hip Hop but something completely fresh; altogether more melodic and playful." The collaboration was immediate. De La Soul visited the Grey Organisation's loft and the cover was conceived and shot in a single session. De La Soul lay down on the floor facing up, their heads making a triangle. Mott photographed them whilst hanging precariously off a step ladder, one idea being that the cover would not have a right way up. No right way up. A cover that could be rotated and still work. For a vinyl sleeve, in an era before CDs dominated, that was a radical design concept. Mott layered the brightly coloured hand drawn flower designs made with Posca paint pens on acetate over the black and white photographic portrait print, which was rostrum camera copied. This was well before the time of Apple Macs and scanning. Hand drawn. Posca paint pens. Acetate overlays. Rostrum camera. No computers. Everything physical, [everything made by hand](https://www.artbeforenoise.com/revolver-beatles-album-cover/), in a loft with rats on the staircase. --- ## Not Hippies. Not Even Close. The media perceived De La to be the hippies of hip hop, a notion derived from the fact that they wore bright tie-dyed clothes, substituted leather medallions for gold chains, incorporated a peace symbol into their cover art, and made repeated references to daisies throughout the album. The group's response was unambiguous. "We can have a psychedelic sound in some of our cuts, but we are not psychedelic rappers and we are not hippies. We are not hippies." They were not hippies. They were three young men from Long Island who had looked at hip hop in 1989; the gold chains, the leather, the aggression, the posturing, and decided to do [something completely different](https://www.artbeforenoise.com/lovesexy-prince-album-cover/). Not as a reaction to it. Not as a critique of it. Simply because it wasn't who they were. De La Soul never asked to be the saviours of hip hop, much less to answer for all the supposed pathologies that critics wanted to put on Black masculinity and Black popular culture. Instead, De La Soul defined their outsiderness through a weird, wild, and wholly self-referential creativity. The cover reflects that outsiderness perfectly. Three men on the floor of a New York loft, photographed from above by someone hanging off a step ladder, with hand drawn daisies layered over the top. It didn't look like any hip hop album that had come before it. It wasn't supposed to. --- ## Questlove Knew Questlove recounts in the documentary Contact High: A Visual History of Hip-Hop that when he saw the album cover as a young man in Philadelphia, "I knew they were my people." Questlove, the drummer of The Roots, one of the most respected figures in hip hop, saw the cover of 3 Feet High and Rising before he heard the music and knew immediately that something different was happening. The cover did its job before a single note was played. That is what a great album cover does. ![The De La Soul Daisy](https://www.artbeforenoise.com/content/images/2026/06/only-true-de-la-soul-fans-know-where-to-find-this-2.png) --- ## What The Cover Actually Says 3 Feet High and Rising reached number 24 on the pop charts at a time when such an achievement was unheard of for a hip hop act, and its biggest single Me Myself and I was a top 40 hit. The Village Voice named it album of the year for 1989. The album cover is in the permanent collection at [MoMA in New York](https://www.artbeforenoise.com/unknown-pleasures-joy-division-album-cover/). A hand drawn daisy design made with Posca paint pens on acetate, in a loft with rats on the staircase, by British artists who had fled London after attacking a gallery district, is now considered one of the great pieces of graphic design of the modern era. In 2010, the US Library of Congress selected the album for inclusion in the National Recording Registry, which identifies American sound recordings that are culturally, historically or aesthetically significant. I came to this album backwards, through De La Soul Is Dead, back to 3 Feet High and Rising. I didn't know any of the songs. I had no expectations. And then I pressed play. And understood. Every song remarkable. The chill. The warmth. The wit. The daisies. A Minnie Mouse nightgown in a shop window. Three men on the floor of a New York loft. A step ladder. Some Posca paint pens. And one of the most important album covers in the history of hip hop. Da Inner Sound Y'all. ### The Dream She Gave Me URL: https://www.artbeforenoise.com/siamese-dream-smashing-pumpkins-album-cover/ Last updated: 2026-08-15T07:41:45.000Z My wife introduced me to the Smashing Pumpkins. Before her, I only really knew one of their songs, Bullet With Butterfly Wings. The one with the rat in a cage. She played me Siamese Dream properly. All the way through. Mayonaise. Disarm. Today. And I understood immediately why this album meant so much to her. It's the kind of record that gets inside you, all that noise and beauty and barely contained sadness, somehow existing simultaneously. And then I looked at the cover. Two little girls in a garden, one hugging the other from behind, faces covered in sparkles, wearing wings. Warm. Innocent. Gentle. The most un-rock-and-roll cover imaginable for one of the defining rock albums of the 1990s. That tension, between the cover and the music inside, is exactly what makes it one of the great album covers of its era. ![Siamese Dream album cover by Smashing Pumpkins](https://www.artbeforenoise.com/content/images/2026/06/Siamese-Dream---Smashing-Pumpkins-album-cover.jpg) ## Album Anatomy | **Album** | *Siamese Dream* | | ---------------- | ----------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------- | | **Artist** | [The Smashing Pumpkins](https://www.artbeforenoise.com/tag/smashing-pumpkins/) | | **Genre** | [Alternative](https://www.artbeforenoise.com/tag/alternative/) | | **Released** | 27 July 1993 | | **Label** | [Virgin Records](https://www.artbeforenoise.com/tag/virgin-records/) | | **On the cover** | A soft-focus photograph of two young girls lying close together against a dark background, widely (and wrongly) assumed to show conjoined twins | | **Design** | Art direction by Len Peltier, design by Steve Gerdes, photography by Melodie McDaniel | | **Decade** | [1990s](https://www.artbeforenoise.com/tag/1990s/) | --- ## Billy Corgan's Vision The cover photograph was shot by Melodie McDaniel, an independent photographer hired to capture the image that Billy Corgan had in mind. Corgan's vision for the cover was precise and personal. The album's feelings of nostalgia and yearning for happiness are reflected in its album cover. Picturing two young girls hugging, wearing wings and with large smiles on their faces, the cover immediately appeals to the universal memory of childhood innocence. Its warm colour tones further this feeling of nostalgia, as many often picture their childhood as being brighter compared to the world today. This was not an accident of styling or a happy coincidence of photography. It was a deliberate statement about what the album was doing emotionally; reaching back toward something simpler, something lost, something that could only exist now as a dream. [*Siamese Dream*](https://amzn.to/4ef9Nyu?ref=artbeforenoise.com) was almost entirely written by Billy Corgan, who was going through an intense period of depression. He channelled his feelings into the album, with many of the songs reflecting his yearning to return to a simpler time when he was happier, before life got hard and he lost his child-like innocence. Disarm is about his difficult relationship with his parents as a child. Today, the deceptively upbeat single, was written on a day when Corgan was experiencing suicidal thoughts. Mayonaise, yes, deliberately spelled without the second n, in a move that is either a deliberate stylistic choice or a [spelling error that nobody caught](https://www.artbeforenoise.com/album-covers-with-mistakes/), and Corgan has never fully clarified is a five minute wall of guitar that sounds like grief given shape. The cover of two children playing in a garden is not a contrast to all of that. It is the source of it. The thing that was lost. The dream that can't be recovered. --- ## A Perfect LA Afternoon Billy Corgan later [wrote on Facebook](https://www.facebook.com/smashingpumpkins/posts/on-such-a-special-day-in-sp-history-i-want-to-take-a-moment-to-thank-ali-and-lys/10156323499172642/) his memories of the shoot: "On such a special day in SP history, I want to take a moment to thank Ali and LySandra, who you might know were the little girls that I stood by and watched have their picture taken some 23 years ago on what was a [perfect LA afternoon](https://www.artbeforenoise.com/nine-inch-nails-downward-spiral-album-cover/). Never realising that this moment in time would forever tie us, and go on to become such an iconic image in rock history." ![Billy Corgan talks about his memories of photographing the 2 girls on the cover of Siamese Dream](https://www.artbeforenoise.com/content/images/2026/06/image.png) A perfect LA afternoon. Two little girls. A photographer. A musician standing to one side, watching, understanding that something true was being captured. The two girls were Ali Laenger and LySandra Roberts. For years their identities were unknown, one of those lovely mysteries that existed before the internet made everything findable. Fans speculated. Theories circulated. And then, in 2018 when the Smashing Pumpkins announced their reunion tour, the band's promotional team tracked them down and the mystery was finally solved. Ali Laenger went on to work as both a model and a designer. LySandra Roberts remained more private. The cover is partly about the mystery of childhood. One of its subjects choosing to stay mysterious is its own kind of poetry. --- ## The Conjoined Twins Who Never Were The title Siamese Dream and the close proximity of the two little girls pictured on the cover led many fans to assume they were conjoined twins. Billy Corgan even seemed to have a little fun with this assumption back in 2007, when he posted that the band were looking for their 1993 cover girls "who are not conjoined anymore, as far as we know." They were never conjoined. They were just two little girls hugging in a garden on a perfect LA afternoon. But the combination of the album title and the image was too tempting for fans not to construct a mythology around. Corgan added to the confusion in 2011 when he announced on Twitter that the band's then-bassist Nicole Fiorentino had revealed that she was one of the girls from the Siamese Dream cover. The world was either delighted or confused as they thought that Fiorentino, who was born in 1979, would have been too old to be a little kid in 1993\. It's thought now that the whole thing was a Billy Corgan Twitter prank. Billy Corgan. Trolling his own fanbase. About his own album cover. Twenty years after it was released. Absolutely wonderful. --- ## The Last Minute Scramble In a [blog entry](https://billycorgan.livejournal.com/22282.html?ref=artbeforenoise.com), Corgan discussed the creation of the booklet's interior artwork; a collection of old photographs adorned with the album's handwritten lyrics. "We only have this single afternoon to finish everything, or the album will be pushed back," Corgan wrote. "Any attempt to this point of working with the label to get what I want artwork-wise have proven to be frustrating and disappointing… so it falls on my shoulders at the last second to get it done, and Chris is recruited in because of her art school background." Chris was Chris Fabian, Corgan's wife at the time. The interior artwork of one of the most celebrated albums of the 1990s was assembled in a single afternoon by Corgan and his wife, scrambling against a deadline, after months of frustration with the label. The cover photograph was the one thing that came together perfectly, a perfect LA afternoon, two little girls, a photographer who knew what she was doing. Everything else was chaos. That is, in many ways, the story of Siamese Dream itself. An album made under enormous pressure, in difficult circumstances, by a band that was barely holding together, and somehow producing something remarkable from the wreckage. --- ## What The Cover Actually Says The cover is not a contrast to the music. It is the music, the yearning at the heart of every song on the album, given visual form. Two children in a garden. Wings. Sparkles. A hug. Everything that gets harder to hold onto as life gets louder and more complicated. Siamese Dream is used to represent a shared dream between Corgan and the audience, just as the two girls in the image share their time and happiness in childhood. Everyone can relate in some way to childhood longing. Mayonaise. Disarm. Today. Songs about pain and loss and the impossibility of going back. ### That Was On Purpose URL: https://www.artbeforenoise.com/this-is-hardcore-pulp-album-cover/ Last updated: 2026-08-15T07:39:17.000Z I was a relatively young man in 1998; 25 is still considered young, isn't it?. I think so. Anyway, I saw the cover of *This Is Hardcore* by Pulp and my honest reaction was "she's naked, awesome!". Then I wanted to know more. Who is she? What is going on here? Do I buy this album because of a naked chick? Do you think she is single? Do I have a chance? Will my girlfriend think I was a perve? How much trouble will I be in? I bought it for the music, obviously. This is actually what Jarvis Cocker intended. He just intended what came after the looking to be something more complicated than the cover. He wanted the cover to draw you in. And then repel you. And he assembled one of the most extraordinary creative teams in the history of album cover art to make sure it did exactly that. Well played, Jarvis. ![A black-and-white photograph of a woman lying face down on a plush surface, wearing dark underwear, framed from behind in a moody, cinematic lighting style reminiscent of noir film.](https://www.artbeforenoise.com/content/images/2026/06/Pulp---This-is-Hardcore-Album-Cover.jpg) Pulp - This is Hardcore ## Album Anatomy | **Album** | *This Is Hardcore* | | ---------------- | -------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------- | | **Artist** | [Pulp](https://www.artbeforenoise.com/tag/pulp/) | | **Genre** | [Alternative](https://www.artbeforenoise.com/tag/alternative/) | | **Released** | 30 March 1998 | | **Label** | [Island Records](https://www.artbeforenoise.com/tag/island-records/) | | **On the cover** | A woman reclining across the frame in a staged, cinematic pose, shot to evoke the glossy sleaze of a film poster | | **Design** | Art direction by [Peter Saville](https://www.artbeforenoise.com/tag/peter-saville/) and John Currin, photography by Horst Diekgerdes, design by Howard Wakefield and Paul Hetherington | | **Decade** | [1990s](https://www.artbeforenoise.com/tag/1990s/) | --- ## The Painter, The Designer and The Shag Pad The cover of [*This Is Hardcore*](https://amzn.to/4vmYXfE?ref=artbeforenoise.com) was the result of a collaboration between three extraordinary creative minds; Jarvis Cocker, [Peter Saville](https://www.artbeforenoise.com/tag/peter-saville/) and American painter [John Currin](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/John%5FCurrin?ref=artbeforenoise.com). I've written about Peter Saville before on this blog, he designed [Unknown Pleasures](https://www.artbeforenoise.com/unknown-pleasures-joy-division-album-cover/) for Joy Division and [Power, Corruption and Lies](https://www.artbeforenoise.com/album-covers-no-text/) for New Order. He is one of the great graphic designers of his generation. His involvement alone signals that this cover was going to be something unusual. Currin was an American figurative painter whose work typically portrayed seedy ageing playboys and improbably fulsome women in a hyper-realistic style. In 1998 he was not yet famous; Cocker had spotted his work and been struck by it, particularly his Martini Man series, which took Playboy magazine advertisements and mischievously altered the faces of the admiring women to make them look contemptuous. Cocker recalled: "I was feeling like that man in the ad. I'd achieved success, but I felt a bit of an idiot. I don't know. It didn't work out the way I thought it was going to. I was going through a dark time." Fame had arrived. It hadn't felt the way he thought it would. The cover of *This Is Hardcore* was Cocker's attempt to say something honest about that feeling, using the visual language of adult cinema and the aesthetic of 1970s sleaze to make a point about the gap between fantasy and reality. The shoot took place at [Saville's own apartment](https://thequietus.com/culture/books/this-is-hardcore-pulp-jane-savidge-thirty-three-third-extract/?ref=artbeforenoise.com), which he had transformed into what The Quietus described as "a swanky celebration of a 1970s shag pad" with the help of Hacienda designer Ben Kelly. The band had run out of money by this point. The final cover shot was taken in Peter Saville's living room. --- ## The Model Who is the woman on the cover? Her name is [Ksenia Zlobina](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/This%5FIs%5FHardcore?ref=artbeforenoise.com). She was photographed by fashion photographer Horst Diekgerdes, not as the intended cover shot, but as one of a series of images taken at Saville's apartment when the band decided that the original Hilton Hotel shoot wasn't hardcore enough. As Saville himself later admitted: "We ended up with this very misogynistic shot of Steve with Ksenia on the pouf... When I look back, it's so questionable. But Ksenia looked wonderful on the red pouf, so we also shot her alone on the pouf and that ended up being the cover." The cover shot, Zlobina alone on the red pouf, her expression vacant and slightly unreal, was not the planned image. It was a pickup shot. A last resort. Taken in a designer's living room with no money left. And it became one of the most discussed album covers of the decade. --- ## The Smart Blur After the photographs were taken, Saville processed them using a Photoshop filter called Smart Blur. At full strength it alters an image so that it looks as if it was painted by numbers. But used gently, it nudges it from photographic reality into painterly photorealism. "We don't quite know digitally what it does," said Saville. "But fascinating things happen between A and B that are not aesthetics-based." The result is an image that looks almost real but not quite. Almost a photograph but not quite. Almost a painting but not quite. It exists in an uncanny valley between reality and representation, which is precisely where Cocker wanted it to be. As Currin put it: "It's weirdly offensive without figuring out why. Just the way the words sit on there is both very elegant and strangely provocative. And the ugly Helvetica." The typography was chosen by Saville to mimic government warnings, the kind of stamped official language you'd find on [adult material](https://www.artbeforenoise.com/lovesexy-prince-album-cover/). Blocky. Authoritative. Slightly threatening. The title *THIS IS HARDCORE* stamped across the image like a censor's mark. Transport for London refused to display the image and title together on bus advertising, they would accept the image alone or the title alone but not both simultaneously. The combination was too much. --- ![Inside the Pulp This is Hardcore album cover](https://www.artbeforenoise.com/content/images/2026/06/Inside-the-Pulp-This-is-Hardcore-album-cover.jpg) ## Draw You In. Repel You. Here is Cocker's own explanation of what the cover was supposed to do, and it's the clearest statement of intent behind any cover we've written about on this blog. "The idea behind the picture was that, initially, it would be attractive, you'd look at the picture and realise it's a semi-clad woman. But then her look is vacant. It almost looks as if she could be dead, or a dummy. So it was supposed to be something that would draw you in and then kind of repel you a bit. That was on purpose." Draw you in. Repel you. On purpose. The cover uses the visual language of exploitation, the adult film aesthetic, the naked woman, the provocative title, to make you feel the thing that exploitation makes you feel. And then it makes you feel uncomfortable about feeling it. Advertising posters showing the cover on the London Underground were defaced by graffiti artists with slogans including *This Offends Women* and *This is Sexist* and *This is Demeaning*. The Independent declared that the woman "looks as if she had been raped." Cocker's response was to point at the vacancy in her expression, the deliberate unreality of the image, the Smart Blur that makes her look almost like a dummy and argue that the cover was a critique of the male gaze rather than an example of it. It is, as Peter Saville himself admitted, a complicated image. One he still finds questionable. One that divides opinion sharply even now. --- ## What The Cover Actually Says I was a young man in 1998\. I saw the cover and noticed a semi-naked woman. I didn't understand what I was looking at. Now I do. And I'm not sure I'm entirely comfortable with it, which is, of course, exactly what Jarvis Cocker intended. The cover of [*This Is Hardcore*](https://amzn.to/4o2Ymx5?ref=artbeforenoise.com) is a cover about the lie at the heart of desire. About the gap between what you imagine and what you get. About fame and how it promises everything and delivers something considerably more complicated. About being a young man who achieves everything he wanted and feels, somehow, like an idiot. The woman on the cover is almost real. Almost a photograph. Almost alive. The Smart Blur makes her something between a person and an object, which is the most uncomfortable thing about it. It will draw you in. Repel you. On purpose. It worked on me in 1998\. It still works now. ### The Decade The Sleeve Became An Art Form - The 1970s URL: https://www.artbeforenoise.com/best-album-covers-1970s/ Last updated: 2026-08-30T12:09:11.000Z The 1970s was the decade when the album sleeve stopped being packaging and became a full‑blown art form. Designers, photographers and painters turned twelve inches of cardboard into cinema screens, protest banners, sci‑fi book jackets and family snapshots that just happened to change the look of music. Concept albums needed concept visuals. Progressive bands wanted entire universes painted for them. Jazz musicians demanded covers that were as radical as the music inside. Punk stripped it all back to the brick wall and a stare. For this list, I’ve looked at what critics, designers and music historians consistently pick out as the most important sleeves of the decade; 70s‑specific round‑ups, design‑led features, “greatest covers ever” lists, plus the stories behind how these images were actually made. The focus, as always, is on the cover first. The record is a bonus. --- ## 11\. The Nice - Elegy (1971) *(Almost made the Top 10)* ![The Nice - Elegy album cover](https://www.artbeforenoise.com/content/images/2026/06/Elegy---The-Nice-Album-Cover.jpg) A line of red balls snakes its way over a Sahara dune, each casting a long evening shadow, disappearing into the horizon under a flat blue sky. No band photo. No title screaming at you. Just a strange, almost calm landscape that becomes stranger the longer you look at it. [Hipgnosis](https://www.artbeforenoise.com/tag/hipgnosis/) took the idea literally: [Storm Thorgerson](https://www.artbeforenoise.com/404/) dreamt the image, then he, Aubrey “Po” Powell and Peter Christopherson flew to Morocco with a van full of 120 red plastic balls, paying locals to help inflate and position them before the sun vanished. This is pre‑Photoshop problem‑solving, brooming away footprints in the sand, shooting fast as the light dies. It’s an elegy in visual form: a band on its way out, a day almost over, a line of colour vanishing into the desert. Quiet, weird and weirdly moving. Add it to your collection: [*Elegy - The Nice*](https://amzn.to/49vkCK9?ref=artbeforenoise.com). --- ## 10\. Carole King - Tapestry (1971) ![Carole King - Tapestry Album Cover](https://www.artbeforenoise.com/content/images/2026/06/Carole-King---Tapestry-Album-Cover.jpg) Carole King sits barefoot on a window seat in her Laurel Canyon home, bathed in soft natural light, a woven tapestry hanging beside her and her cat Telemachus perched calmly on the sill. She looks straight at the camera, relaxed but self‑possessed, like you’ve just dropped in for coffee and she hasn’t bothered to dress up. Photographer Jim McCrary reportedly asked if they could move the cat into shot after remembering a Kodak survey that said people loved photos of their pets; he scooped up Telemachus and his cushion, placed them by the window and got only a handful of frames before the cat bolted. One of those shots became one of the most recognisable sleeves of the decade. In an era obsessed with spectacle, [*Tapestry*](https://amzn.to/4u7RNLm?ref=artbeforenoise.com) sells something different: domestic intimacy as a kind of power. It’s a singer‑songwriter record that looks exactly like it sounds. Add it to your collection: [*Tapestry - Carole King*](https://amzn.to/4u7RNLm?ref=artbeforenoise.com). --- ## 9\. Sly & The Family Stone - There’s a Riot Goin’ On (1971) ![Sly & The Family Stone - There’s a Riot Goin’ On Album Cover](https://www.artbeforenoise.com/content/images/2026/06/Sly---The-Family-Stone---There---s-a-Riot-Goin----On---Album-Cover.jpg) From a distance it’s just an American flag. Look closer and the stars replaced by suns on a black bakground, the whole thing darker, heavier, stranger. [No band name](https://www.artbeforenoise.com/album-covers-no-text/). No album title. Just this altered banner. Sly Stone’s concept was deliberate: he wanted a flag that represented “people of all colours” - black for the absence of colour, white for the sum of all colours, red for the blood everyone shares, suns instead of stars because the sun is always there. It’s both patriotic and anti‑patriotic at once. For a record steeped in exhaustion, disillusion and warped funk, the cover does the same thing visually: takes a familiar symbol and drags it somewhere murkier. Simple idea, massive resonance. Make room for it on your shelf: [*There’s a Riot Goin’ On – Sly & The Family Stone*](https://amzn.to/4u7zQfQ?ref=artbeforenoise.com). --- ## 8\. Ramones - Ramones (1976) ![Ramones - Self Titles Album cover against a brick wall](https://www.artbeforenoise.com/content/images/2026/06/Ramones---Self-Titles-Album-cover-against-a-brick-wall.jpg) Four guys in leather jackets lean against a scuffed brick wall in New York, ripped jeans, sneakers, snarls (or boredom) aimed straight at you. No props, no styling beyond what they already live in, just the band, the wall and a logo stamped above them. Photographer Roberta Bayley shot the cover outside a studio in the East Village; the label reportedly paid her around $125 for what became one of the most imitated band portraits in rock history. You can feel how cold and cheap the shoot was, that’s the charm. As a visual manifesto for punk, it’s perfect: this is what we look like, this is where we live, no fantasy necessary. Every garage band against a brick wall since is really just copying this. Worth owning in any format: [*Ramones - Ramones*](https://amzn.to/4ajPZaK?ref=artbeforenoise.com). --- ## 7\. Wishbone Ash - Argus (1972) ![Wishbone Ash Argus Album Cover](https://www.artbeforenoise.com/content/images/2026/06/Wishbone-Ash-Argus-Album-Cover.jpg) A cloaked warrior stands on a hilltop, back to the camera, spear in hand, looking out over a hazy valley as the sun burns through the mist. His helmet hides his face completely; he could be a medieval soldier, a sci‑fi sentinel or someone out of a half‑remembered myth. Hipgnosis shot the cover in the Gorges du Verdon in France, dressing the figure in costume borrowed from Ken Russell’s *The Devils* and intending to arm him with both spear and sword; a sword rented from Roman Polanski’s *Macbeth* that, according to the designers, never made it into the final shot. On the back cover, the same sentinel appears to herald or witness the arrival of a spaceship, quietly folding science fiction into the pastoral scene. It’s a prog rock sleeve that understands the assignment: give you a world to step into before the needle even drops. Add it to your collection: [*Argus - Wishbone Ash*](https://amzn.to/4fRqilx?ref=artbeforenoise.com). --- ## 6\. Miles Davis - Bitches Brew (1970) ![Miles Davis - Bitches Brew Album Cover](https://www.artbeforenoise.com/content/images/2026/06/Miles-Davis---Bitches-Brew-Album-Cover.jpg) A couple’s faces in profile, hair whipped by unseen wind; to their right, a turbulent ocean, clouds forming a skull‑like shape overhead, lightning strikes over the ocean. Everywhere you look, there are tiny details. Miles Davis asked painter [Mati Klarwein](https://www.matiklarweinart.com/?ref=artbeforenoise.com) to listen to the music and paint what he heard; the result is a dense Afro‑futurist collage of African, Eastern and interracial imagery that feels as restless as the double‑LP inside. Columbia’s art director John Berg framed it with gothic lettering and let the painting dominate. Plenty of covers try to say “this music is new.” *Bitches Brew* actually matches the shock of the sound, visually. For anyone wanting the real thing: [*Bitches Brew - Miles Davis*](https://amzn.to/4wY7ibr?ref=artbeforenoise.com). --- ## 5\. Pink Floyd - Animals (1977) ![Pink Floyd - Animals Album Cover](https://www.artbeforenoise.com/content/images/2026/06/Pink-Floyd---Animals-Album-Cover.jpg) Battersea Power Station looms under a heavy, polluted sky, all brick and chimneys and industrial gloom. Between two of the stacks, calmly floating, is an [inflatable pig](https://www.artbeforenoise.com/ok-computer-radiohead-album-cover/). The cover concept came from Roger Waters and was executed by, who else, [Hipgnosis](https://www.artbeforenoise.com/tag/hipgnosis/): a giant helium pig tethered between the chimneys for a series of shoots. At one point the pig famously broke free, drifting into the flight path at Heathrow and forcing the band to reschedule the shoot; the final sleeve uses a composite image with a retouched pig. It’s a blunt but brilliant metaphor: a bloated animal drifting above a monument to industrial capitalism, the whole thing looming over London. Satire, postcard and dystopia in one frame. Add it to your collection: [*Animals - Pink Floyd*](https://amzn.to/4e58n8K?ref=artbeforenoise.com). --- ## 4\. Led Zeppelin - Houses of the Holy (1973) ![Led Zeppelin - Houses of the Holy Album Cover](https://www.artbeforenoise.com/content/images/2026/06/Led-Zeppelin---Houses-of-the-Holy-Album-Cover.jpg) Naked, pale‑haired children clamber over a landscape of stacked basalt columns, the rocks glowing in orange and purple as if lit from another planet. There’s no band visible, no instruments, just figures moving inexorably upwards toward a white horizon. The photographs were shot by [Aubrey Powell of Hipgnosis](https://www.artbeforenoise.com/wish-you-were-here-pink-floyd-album-cover/) at the Giant’s Causeway in Northern Ireland, then multi‑printed to make two child models look like many. The entire scene was inspired by the closing image of Arthur C. Clarke’s [*Childhood’s End*](https://amzn.to/3RFa0lT?ref=artbeforenoise.com), in which groups of children leave Earth in a strange, collective rapture. The result is eerie and beautiful in equal measure, rock album as science‑fiction book cover, mythologising the band without ever showing them. Add it to your collection: [*Houses of the Holy - Led Zeppelin*](https://amzn.to/3RZGFTf?ref=artbeforenoise.com). --- ## 3\. Meat Loaf - Bat Out of Hell (1977) ![Meat Loaf - Bat Out of Hell album cover](https://www.artbeforenoise.com/content/images/2026/06/Meat-Loaf---Bat-Out-of-Hell-album-cover.jpg) A graveyard stretches into the distance under a blood‑red sky. In the foreground, a man on a motorcycle explodes out of a fresh grave, wheels turning in mid‑air; behind him, a gigantic bat perches on a mausoleum like a demon gargoyle surveying its kingdom. The concept came from songwriter Jim Steinman and was brought to life by comic artist Richard Corben, whose heavy‑metal pulp style turns the whole thing into a paperback horror poster turned up to eleven. Q magazine later named it one of the hundred best record covers of all time. Subtle it isn’t. But for a record that lives on operatic excess, motorbikes, sex and death, it’s exactly right: one ridiculous, glorious, unforgettable panel. For anyone wanting the real thing: [*Bat Out of Hell - Meat Loaf*](https://amzn.to/4x1Hb3h?ref=artbeforenoise.com). --- ## 2\. Pink Floyd - The Dark Side of the Moon (1973) ![Pink Floyd - Dark Side of the Moon album cover](https://www.artbeforenoise.com/content/images/2026/06/Pink-Floyd---Dark-Side-of-the-Moon.jpg) A beam of white light enters a glass prism from the left, breaks into a rainbow and exits as a spectrum on the right, all against a pure black field. [No band name](https://www.artbeforenoise.com/album-covers-no-text/). No album title. Just physics, reduced to logo. Hipgnosis came up with the idea after seeing a prism diagram in a school science book, then refined it with ultra‑clean lines and subtle gradients until it felt less like a diagram and more like an emblem. On the original gatefold the beam wraps around the package, turning the whole sleeve into one continuous flow of light. Every designer list and magazine feature that tries to rank album art ends up putting this somewhere near the top, and not just for the 70s. It’s one of those rare covers that escapes its own record and becomes a symbol for an entire genre. Add it to your collection: [*The Dark Side of the Moon - Pink Floyd*](https://amzn.to/4x46aCQ?ref=artbeforenoise.com). --- ## 1\. Joy Division - Unknown Pleasures (1979) ![Joy Division - Unknown Pleasures Album Cover](https://www.artbeforenoise.com/content/images/2026/06/those-lines-social-sqaure.png) Twenty‑four white waveforms pulse up and down on a black background, stacked like a mountain range or a cardiogram frozen mid‑beat. No text. No logo. Nothing to explain what you’re looking at. Designer [Peter Saville](https://www.artbeforenoise.com/tag/peter-saville/) lifted the image from an illustration of radio pulses from the [collapsed star](https://www.artbeforenoise.com/unknown-pleasures-joy-division-album-cover/) PSR B1919+21 in *The Cambridge Encyclopaedia of Astronomy*, then inverted it so the pulses became bright lines on darkness. [Factory Records](https://www.artbeforenoise.com/tag/factory-records/) printed it with no title on the front, trusting that the stark graphic would do all the work. Rolling Stone’s recent ranking of the [greatest album covers of all time](https://www.rollingstone.com/music/music-lists/best-album-covers-1235035232/the-beatles-abbey-road-3-1235039404/?ref=artbeforenoise.com) put *Unknown Pleasures* at number one, ahead of *Abbey Road*, *Dark Side of the Moon* and everything else. It’s hard to argue: few sleeves are this minimal, this mysterious and this widely copied. Add it to your collection: [*Unknown Pleasures - Joy Division*](https://amzn.to/4a79kMl?ref=artbeforenoise.com). --- Look across these eleven albums and their covers, and you get a decade in miniature: desert surrealism, domestic portraits, protest flags, punk brickwork, prog fantasy, Afro‑futurist painting, industrial satire and pure, distilled graphic design. The music inside ranges from jazz fusion to punk to stadium rock, but the sleeves are all doing the same basic job; pulling you closer, asking you to look, and rewarding you when you do. ### Everyone Said No URL: https://www.artbeforenoise.com/brat-charli-xcx-album-cover/ Last updated: 2026-09-02T12:33:29.000Z I don't know much about Charli XCX. But I know that cover. The bold lime green. The blurry lowercase text. Four letters. Nothing else. It catches your eye before you know what you're looking at, which is, as it turns out, exactly what it was designed to do. ![The cover for Charlie XCX Brat - It is meant to be blurry](https://www.artbeforenoise.com/content/images/2026/05/Charlie-XCX-Brat-Cover.jpg) ## Album Anatomy | **Album** | *Brat* | | ---------------- | ------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------ | | **Artist** | [Charli XCX](https://www.artbeforenoise.com/tag/charli-xcx/) | | **Genre** | [Electronic](https://www.artbeforenoise.com/tag/electronic/) | | **Released** | 7 June 2024 | | **Label** | [Atlantic Records](https://www.artbeforenoise.com/tag/atlantic-records/) | | **On the cover** | A flat, low-resolution square of lime green with the word "brat" stretched and blurred across it in lowercase Arial | | **Design** | Brent David Freaney at [Special Offer, Inc.](https://www.artbeforenoise.com/tag/special-offer/), art direction by Imogene Strauss and Charli XCX | | **Decade** | [2020s](https://www.artbeforenoise.com/tag/2020s/) | --- ## 500 Shades Of Green The cover of [*Brat*](https://amzn.to/4uQfp8j?ref=artbeforenoise.com) looks like it took about thirty seconds to make. A colour. A word. Done. It did not take thirty seconds. Designer Brent David Freaney of creative tech studio [Special Offer](https://specialoffer.nyc/?ref=artbeforenoise.com) admitted they combed through 500 shades of green before landing on that one. Five hundred. The one that made your eyes squint. The one that Charli herself called "unfriendly and uncool." The shade of green was selected on the basis of whichever variation drew the most averse reaction from her team. They tested greens until they found the one that made everyone uncomfortable. And then they used that one. The colour is [#8ACE00](https://www.color-hex.com/color/8ace00?ref=artbeforenoise.com); a specific, registered, reproducible hex code that became one of the most recognised colours in popular culture in 2024\. It has a name now. Brat Green. Not Pantone's official colour of 2024, that was [Peach Fuzz](https://www.pantone.com/color-of-the-year/2024?ref=artbeforenoise.com), but the colour that actually defined the year. --- ## The Font That Isn't Blurry Most people assume the text on the Brat cover is blurry. It isn't. Not exactly. In honour of the MySpace days, where tiny images were reused by upscaling them without accounting for resolution, the album cover's text received the same treatment. The pixelation effect is deliberate, stretched Arial font that looks low resolution because it is low resolution. On purpose. Arial. The most unremarkable font in the history of digital communication. The font your school used for worksheets. The font nobody chooses when they have a choice. As Freaney put it: "It's weirdly offensive without figuring out why. Just the way the words sit on there is both very elegant and strangely provocative. And the ugly Helvetica." Wait, he called it [Helvetica](https://www.artbeforenoise.com/massive-attack-album-covers/). It's Arial. Even the designer got confused about which unremarkable font they used on one of the most iconic covers of the decade. That detail feels very *brat*. --- ## The Cover Charli's Team Didn't Want "My manager, my creative director, all my friends were like nooo, not the text cover," Charli said. Everyone around her said no. And she did it anyway. Charli moved forward with the idea after making some design mock-ups on her phone, stating that the concept, especially her physical absence from the cover, "very much embodies the word brat." No face. No body. No glamour. Just a colour and a word. "I think the constant demand for access to [women's bodies and faces](https://www.artbeforenoise.com/horses-patti-smith-album-cover/) in our album artwork is misogynistic and boring," Charli wrote on X in response to fan criticism. The cover wasn't just an aesthetic choice. It was a statement about what a female artist owes her audience, and the answer, according to Charli, is nothing. Not her face. Not her body. Just the music. And a very specific shade of green. ![Charlie XCX Tweet about the cover of Brat](https://www.artbeforenoise.com/content/images/2026/05/Charlie-XCX-Tweet.webp) --- ## The Brat Wall On May 2, Charli tweeted out an address for a street in Brooklyn, NY, the location of a surprise pop-up performance and what would become the infamous Brat Wall. The wall was used pre-release to write messages over the lime-green background, including lyrics from the album's tracks, all live streamed on her TikTok account each time it was updated. The cover had [escaped the album](https://www.artbeforenoise.com/aladdin-sane-david-bowie-album-cover/) before the album was even released. A wall in Brooklyn became a canvas. The colour became a movement. The London Eye was lit up in lime green on the day of the album's release. A landmark. In Brat Green. Because a designer found the right shade of ugly on attempt number 500. --- ## Kamala Is Brat And then something nobody predicted happened. On July 21, mere hours after Joe Biden dropped out of the 2024 presidential race, Charli went to X to tweet "kamala IS brat." Almost immediately, Harris' marketing team changed their X campaign banner to a lime green, brat-stylized banner with "kamala hq" written in the signature low-resolution Arial font. A cover designed to [save money](https://www.artbeforenoise.com/revolver-beatles-album-cover/). A colour chosen because it made everyone uncomfortable. A font nobody respects. And it ended up on the social media campaign of a US presidential candidate. Barack Obama put *Brat* on his playlist and said: "Charli XCX, she knows what she's doing." ![Kamala HQ in Charlie XCX Brat Style](https://www.artbeforenoise.com/content/images/2026/05/Kamala-HQ-in-Charlie-XCX-Brat-Style-1.jpg) --- ## What The Cover Actually Says The cover of *Brat* is not trying to be beautiful. It is not trying to be sophisticated. It is not trying to give you anything you expected. In a cultural moment where aesthetics are algorithmically sanitised, Brat felt like a slap. A cover that looked wrong. That made people uncomfortable. That everyone said no to. That ended up on a Brooklyn wall, the London Eye, a presidential campaign, and Barack Obama's playlist. On 31 October 2024, "brat" was named the word of the year by the Collins English Dictionary. A four letter word. In blurry Arial. On a disgusting shade of green. That catches your eye before you know what you're looking at. That's the point. ### The Cover Nobody Saw URL: https://www.artbeforenoise.com/appetite-for-destruction-guns-n-roses-album-cover/ Last updated: 2026-08-15T13:31:08.000Z I was in high school when [*Appetite For Destruction*](https://amzn.to/3Ptpnxb?ref=artbeforenoise.com) came out in [1987](https://www.artbeforenoise.com/inxs-kick-album-cover/). We all loved it. Welcome to the Jungle. Paradise City. Sweet Child O' Mine. Axl's scream. Slash's hair. Great memories. But here's the thing. The cover I had in my head, the one I associated with that album, those memories, that era, was the cross and skulls design. Dark, slightly gothic, unmistakably Guns N' Roses. I assumed that was always the cover. It wasn't. There was another one. And most of the world never saw it. ![Guns n Roses - Appetite for Destruction - The Cover We All Know](https://www.artbeforenoise.com/content/images/2026/05/Guns-n-Roses---Appetite-for-Destruction---The-Cover-We-All-Know.jpg) The Cover We All Know ## Album Anatomy | **Album** | *Appetite for Destruction* | | ---------------- | -------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------- | | **Artist** | [Guns N' Roses](https://www.artbeforenoise.com/tag/guns-n-roses/) | | **Genre** | [Rock](https://www.artbeforenoise.com/tag/rock/) | | **Released** | 21 July 1987 | | **Label** | [Geffen Records](https://www.artbeforenoise.com/tag/geffen-records/) | | **On the cover** | A Celtic cross with five skulls representing each band member - the replacement cover, after retailers refused to stock the original | | **Design** | Cross design by Billy White Jr. and Axl Rose (final cover); original painting by [Robert Williams](https://www.artbeforenoise.com/tag/robert-williams/), relegated to the inner sleeve | | **Decade** | [1980s](https://www.artbeforenoise.com/tag/1980s/) | --- ## Robert Williams and the Underground Before we talk about the cover, we need to talk about the artist who painted it. Robert Williams came out of the underground comix scene of the 1960s. A movement that deliberately operated outside the mainstream art world, embracing the grotesque, the surreal and the deliberately offensive as legitimate artistic tools. He had worked for Ed "Big Daddy" Roth, the legendary hot rod customiser and creator of [Rat Fink](https://www.ratfink.com/?ref=artbeforenoise.com), and had spent years developing a bold, graphic style that the fine art establishment wanted absolutely nothing to do with. Williams wasn't an unknown shock merchant. He'd come out of the underground comix scene and lowbrow art world, where offence wasn't a side effect, it was often the point. His painting *Appetite For Destruction,* completed in 1978, depicted a robotic figure standing over a woman in a scene of sexual violence, with a metal avenger looming above. It was not a comfortable image. It was not meant to be. The painting was originally a postcard that could be bought in at least one museum gift shop in the late 70s and early 80s. A postcard. In a museum gift shop. The image that would eventually cause one of the [biggest cover controversies in rock history](https://www.artbeforenoise.com/beatles-butcher-cover-yesterday-and-today/) was available as a postcard. ![The original, first pressing of Appetite for Destruction featuring the robot violence scene](https://www.artbeforenoise.com/content/images/2026/05/Guns-N--Roses---Appetite-for-Destruction---First-Pressing.webp) Original Cover. Source: [https://www.reddit.com/r/vinyl/comments/1jpdw4u/guns\_n\_roses\_appetite\_for\_destruction\_1987\_1st/](https://www.reddit.com/r/vinyl/comments/1jpdw4u/guns%5Fn%5Froses%5Fappetite%5Ffor%5Fdestruction%5F1987%5F1st/?ref=artbeforenoise.com) --- ## Axl's Joke Axl Rose saw the postcard and loved it. He pitched it as the album cover as a joke, thinking it was too ridiculous to actually happen. [Geffen ](https://www.artbeforenoise.com/tag/geffen-records/)went for it. He was joking. The record label said yes. And suddenly Guns N' Roses had a debut album with a painting depicting sexual violence on the front cover. Williams himself could see exactly what was coming. "I suggested that they come over to my house and look through some slides and pick something else for the cover," Williams once told Revolver magazine, "because I knew they were gonna get in trouble with it." The artist warned them. Axl was joking. And Geffen said yes. Everything about this story is completely chaotic and completely Guns N' Roses. --- ## The Recall The reaction was swift and decisive. Both American and British [retail chains refused to stock the album](https://www.artbeforenoise.com/lovesexy-prince-album-cover/). Geffen quickly forced the band to find a replacement and another edition was printed with a new cover. Williams' painting was moved to the inner sleeve. In Australia, the cross and skulls version was almost certainly the only one that made it to shelves. The original would have had extremely limited international distribution before the recall kicked in. The only place I remember seeing the brutal cover was on t-shirts. --- ## The Tattoo That Became A Logo So where did the cross and skulls design come from? "One day Axl called and asked if I could draw him a tattoo, after he'd seen a drawing I'd done on my cousin's wall," artist Billy White Jr recalled. "I said sure, and we talked. The cross and skulls that looked like the band was Axl's idea. The rest was me. The knot work in the cross was a reference to Thin Lizzy, a band Axl and I both loved." A tattoo design. Drawn as a personal favour. With a nod to Thin Lizzy hidden in the knotwork. "Axl called again and said my design was going to be on the cover of everything, because the Williams painting got rejected," White said. "I was okay with that." He was okay with that. The most recognisable logo in hard rock history, the design that would appear on millions of t-shirts, posters, patches and tattoos around the world, and the man who drew it was okay with that. --- ## What The Two Covers Actually Say The original Williams painting is genuinely difficult to look at. As a teenager I saw it on t-shirts without fully understanding what I was looking at. The image is dark, deliberately provocative and, once you understand what it depicts, it is genuinely uncomfortable. That discomfort was Williams' point. It always was. But the cross and skulls replacement is interesting too. Five skulls, one for each band member, arranged around a Celtic cross with Thin Lizzy knotwork hiding in the design. It is gothic and aggressive but also personal. Each skull is a band member. Each member is represented. It is, in its own way, a portrait. Appetite For Destruction has sold close to 30 million copies worldwide, making it the [best selling debut album in history](https://www.artbeforenoise.com/licensed-to-ill-beastie-boys-album-cover/). The cover that most of the world knows is the one drawn as a tattoo by a friend who was okay with it going on the front of a record. The cover that caused the controversy is the one most people have never actually seen. Welcome to the jungle indeed. ### Absence URL: https://www.artbeforenoise.com/wish-you-were-here-pink-floyd-album-cover/ Last updated: 2026-07-22T07:26:39.000Z You know the cover. Two men in suits shaking hands. One of them on fire. Against a bright California sky. I always assumed I understood it. Two businessmen. A deal being done. Someone getting burned. Fine. Move on. I didn't understand it at all. And I definitely didn't know about the invisible man. ![](https://www.artbeforenoise.com/content/images/2026/05/Pink-Floyd---Wish-You-Were-Here-Album-Cover.jpg) --- ## One Word Storm Thorgerson, co-founder of [Hipgnosis](https://www.artbeforenoise.com/tag/hipgnosis/), explained his process simply: *"We just sit in a very ordinary room, listen to* [*Floyd music*](https://www.artbeforenoise.com/tag/pink-floyd/)*, and talk. We discuss what the music feels like to us. Or the intention of the lyrics. Or what the album may really be about, even if the Floyd haven't said it, or don't yet know it."* After lengthy discussions with the band and repeated exposure to the haunting brilliance of Shine On You Crazy Diamond, Thorgerson arrived at a single word that would define everything about the cover of [*Wish You Were Here*](https://amzn.to/4vbCpyh?ref=artbeforenoise.com). Absence. One word. The entire visual concept of one of the most celebrated album covers in rock history distilled into a single syllable. Once you know that word, everything on this cover and everything surrounding it snaps into focus. --- ## The Ghost in the Room Before we talk about the burning man, we need to talk about why the album exists at all. *Wish You Were Here* is, at its heart, about [Syd Barrett](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Syd%5FBarrett?ref=artbeforenoise.com), the brilliant, troubled co-founder of Pink Floyd who had descended into mental illness in the late 1960s and effectively disappeared from the band's life. By 1975 he was a ghost. Present in the music, in the memories, in the guilt, but physically absent from everything. On 5 June 1975, on the eve of the second North American leg of their Wish You Were Here Tour, the band were completing the mix of Shine On You Crazy Diamond when an overweight man with shaven head and eyebrows entered, carrying a plastic bag. Waters did not recognise him. Gilmour presumed he was an EMI staff member. Wright presumed he was a friend of Waters. Mason also failed to recognise him. It was Barrett. Mason recalled Barrett's conversation as "desultory and not entirely sensible." Storm Thorgerson would later reflect: *"Two or three people cried. He sat round and talked for a bit but he wasn't really there."* According to Gilmour, Barrett "came two or three days and then he didn't come any more." The man the album was written for walked into the studio while they were finishing it, unrecognised by the people who loved him most. And then he left. And they never saw him again. That is what absence means on this album. That is what the cover is carrying. --- ## Burning a Man for Real The central image was inspired by the idea that people often hide their real emotions out of fear of vulnerability, afraid of getting burned if they reveal too much. The two businessmen were inspired by the song Have a Cigar, a slight at industry heads who had lost sight of the big picture in favour of making a quick buck. A handshake, often an empty gesture, between two men, one of whom is literally on fire. Getting burned, in the music industry, is slang for being exploited by a bad deal. [Hipgnosis](https://www.artbeforenoise.com/album-covers-no-text/) took the metaphor and made it literal. But how do you photograph a man on fire? Powell remembered asking the question to Storm. He replied: *"I guess you're going to have to burn a man for real."* The photograph was taken at Warner Bros. Studios in California. Two stuntmen were used; [Ronnie Rondell Jr.](https://www.floydianslip.com/news/2018/01/the-story-behind-pink-floyds-wish-you-were-here-cover-photo/?ref=artbeforenoise.com) and Danny Rogers. Rondell was dressed in a fireproof suit covered by a business suit, with a hood beneath a fireproof wig and fire resistant gel applied to him. After fourteen successful takes, the wind changed direction on the fifteenth, singed Rondell's moustache and he threw himself to the ground. His team smothered him with extinguishers and blankets. He said: *"No more."* That was enough. The iconic shot had been immortalised. The shoot took place at [Warner Bros. Studios](https://www.artbeforenoise.com/nine-inch-nails-downward-spiral-album-cover/), the land of make believe, where nothing is real and all is absent. Thorgerson chose the location deliberately. Even the backdrop was a lie. --- ## The Invisible Man Now, the invisible man. The detail I didn't know about. The detail most people don't know about. On the back cover there is an image of a man in a suit, only the man's body, facial features and limbs are invisible. It's just an empty business suit. A Floyd salesman, Thorgerson called him. Selling his soul in the desert. The absence of wrists and ankles signifies his presence as an empty suit. No face. No hands. No feet. Just a suit standing in the Yuma Desert in California, holding a transparent record. A man so consumed by the music industry that he has ceased to exist as a human being. Only the suit remains. That is the invisible man. Not a ghost. Not a trick of the light. A deliberate, carefully constructed image of total human absence; the logical endpoint of selling your soul to the machine. ![](https://www.artbeforenoise.com/content/images/2026/05/Wish-You-Were-Here---Pink-Floyd-Back-Cover.webp) --- ## The Album You Couldn't See And then Thorgerson did something that no record company wanted and every record buyer found deeply unsettling. He concealed the artwork for *Wish You Were Here* in a [black coloured shrink wrap](https://www.artbeforenoise.com/lovesexy-prince-album-cover/), making the album art absent. A sticker of two mechanical hands engaged in a handshake was placed on the opaque sleeve. [Pink Floyd fans rushed into stores on September 12 1975](https://hiddentrack.ie/features/songs-and-album-covers/shaking-hands-with-fire-the-making-of-wish-you-were-heres-artwork/?ref=artbeforenoise.com) to get their copies of *Wish You Were Here*. They found a mysterious package wrapped in a black plastic shrink cover, with only a round label featuring a robotic handshake. Some, too eager to get to the music, sadly ripped it off. [Columbia Records](https://www.artbeforenoise.com/tag/columbia-records/) in America rejected the idea completely. But they were overruled. The artists' choice prevailed. Nick Mason summed it up perfectly: *"I suspect we probably enjoyed the shrink-wrapping more for the trouble it caused in the boardroom than its artistic excellence."* ![The Black Cover of Wish You Were Here - Pink Floyd](https://www.artbeforenoise.com/content/images/2026/05/The-Black-Cover-of-Wish-You-Were-Here---Pink-Floyd.webp) --- ## The Four Elements Here is one final detail that most people never notice. The sticker on the shrink wrap represented a mechanical handshake over a background representing the four elements; a teaser for the cover inside. The flaming man [handshake](https://www.artbeforenoise.com/to-pimp-a-butterfly-kendrick-lamar-album-cover/) represents Fire. The faceless man in the desert: Earth. The Mono Lake still diver: Water. And the floating red scarf: Air. Four elements. Four images. One word, absence, running through all of them. A diver entering water without making a splash. A veil floating in the wind over nothing. A faceless man in the desert. A burning man shaking hands with someone who doesn't flinch. Storm Thorgerson built an entire visual universe around a single word. And then he hid it inside a black plastic bag and let you find it yourself. --- ## What It Actually Means I thought I understood this cover. Two businessmen. Someone getting burned. Fine. But the cover of *Wish You Were Here* is about absence in every possible sense. The absence of Syd Barrett, the absence of genuine human connection, the absence of honesty in the music industry, the absence of the self when the machine has finished with you. The invisible man on the back cover is the most honest image on the whole sleeve. No face. No hands. No feet. Just a suit in the desert. Storm Thorgerson once explained the cover's haunting power: *"What's the worst thing you can say to someone? Wish you were here."* Three words. One album. One word that explains everything. ### Nothing URL: https://www.artbeforenoise.com/yeezus-kanye-west-album-cover/ Last updated: 2026-08-15T04:52:22.000Z When I first saw the cover of [*Yeezus*](https://amzn.to/4nOTtYp?ref=artbeforenoise.com), I looked at it. I moved on. I didn't care. A clear plastic CD case. A piece of red tape. Nothing else. No band name. No album title. No image. No effort, or so I thought. Just [Kanye being Kanye](https://www.artbeforenoise.com/mbdtf-kanye-west-album-cover/). Again. The most provocative artist in music doing something provocative for the sake of being provocative. Fine. Whatever. However, I was wrong. Not about the music, Black Skinhead is a great song. But about the cover. Because the cover of *Yeezus* is not nothing. It is one of the most deliberate, most considered, most conceptually loaded pieces of album packaging in modern music history. ![Yeezus album cover by Kanye West](https://www.artbeforenoise.com/content/images/2026/05/Yeezus-Album-Cover-is-Nothing.jpg) Yeezus - This is all of it --- ## The Reducer Before we talk about the cover we need to talk about [Rick Rubin](https://www.artbeforenoise.com/tag/rick-rubin/). Because the cover and the music were born from exactly the same impulse. In early 2013, Kanye West asked legendary producer and [Def Jam](https://www.artbeforenoise.com/tag/def-jam-records/) Recordings co-founder [Rick Rubin](https://www.artbeforenoise.com/licensed-to-ill-beastie-boys-album-cover/) to help complete his new album. With only weeks to meet West's deadline and a rough cut of sixteen unfocused and unfinished tracks, the task appeared nearly impossible. The rough cut ran nearly three and a half hours. In the studio, the two began deconstructing the tracks, unveiling the edgy and minimal and hard sound West had been searching for. The duo worked for sixteen days, fifteen hours a day, with no time off. West's instructions to Rubin were precise; take everything in a stripped-down, minimal direction. Remove elements. Reduce. Simplify. And when Rubin had finished, West delivered his verdict on the collaboration with characteristic economy: "He's not a producer, he's a reducer." A reducer. Strip everything back. Take away what isn't needed. Leave only what is essential. The cover of *Yeezus* is the visual expression of that exact philosophy. And it was always going to be. --- ## The Anti-Cover The original physical release shipped in a clear jewel case with no booklet or printed tray card. On many copies a red strip of industrial tape sealed the spine. The vinyl release used a minimalist semi-transparent sleeve. No artist name. No album title. No image. No liner notes. Nothing. West ranted about the cover: "With this album we ain't drop no single to radio. We ain't got no NBA campaign, nothing like that. Shit, we ain't even got no cover. We just made some real music." Disgruntled with the state of the music industry in 2013, viewing pop radio as uninspired, marketing as cynical, packaging as a commercial exercise, West made a decision that was simultaneously the laziest and most labour-intensive thing he could have done. Lazy because it required no design. Labour-intensive because it required the complete dismantling of everything the music industry expected an album to be. A piece of tape on a clear case is not an absence of design so much as a [critique of design](https://www.artbeforenoise.com/brat-charli-xcx-album-cover/), legible only against the maximalism it was rejecting. The cover of *Yeezus* only makes sense when you know what came immediately before it, [*My Beautiful Dark Twisted Fantasy*](https://www.artbeforenoise.com/mbdtf-kanye-west-album-cover/), which we've already written about on this blog. That album featured George Condo paintings, multiple alternate covers, a gatefold sleeve, and some of the most elaborate album packaging in recent memory. *Yeezus* followed it with a piece of red tape on a clear plastic case. The maximalism of MBDTF and the minimalism of Yeezus are in direct conversation with each other. Same artist. Three years apart. Two completely opposite visual philosophies. --- ## Peter Saville's Fingerprints There's no denying the coincidence between the final artwork and an unreleased cover that legendary art director [Peter Saville](https://www.artbeforenoise.com/tag/peter-saville/) designed for New Order back in 2001\. West supposedly approached Saville about designing a similar record cover for him, but he refused on the grounds that he didn't want to duplicate his work. [Peter Saville](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Peter%5FSaville%5F%28graphic%5Fdesigner%29?ref=artbeforenoise.com). The man who designed Unknown Pleasures. The man who put the pulsar graph on the first post ever written on this blog. The man behind Power, Corruption and Lies, the New Order album we featured in the [Say Nothing](https://www.artbeforenoise.com/album-covers-no-text/) post about covers with no text. Kanye West approached [Peter Saville](https://www.artbeforenoise.com/unknown-pleasures-joy-division-album-cover/) to design Yeezus. Saville said no. And the cover that West ended up with was strikingly similar to Saville's unreleased New Order work from 2001 anyway. ![Album cover for New Order - Power, Corruption, and Lies](https://www.artbeforenoise.com/content/images/2026/05/New-Order---Power--Corruption---Lies.jpg) New Order - Power, Corruption, and Lies --- ## Please Add Graffiti A.P.C. founder Jean Touitou shared an image with "Please Add Graffiti" text above the album before release, encouraging fan participation. The directive led to the creation of YeezyGraffiti.com (don't go looking for it, the website is long gone). Fans could submit their own cover concepts, and the phrase appeared on street posters in New York City, turning the blank cover into a canvas and the release into a participatory event. A blank cover. Deliberately blank. Inviting the world to fill it. The absence of design as an open invitation to design. The anti-cover becoming a collective canvas. Virgil Abloh, who served as assistant creative director of West's creative content company DONDA at the time, described the packaging as an "open casket." The packaging performs the death of the format it inhabits. The death of the album cover. Staged deliberately. By the man who would go on to become one of the most celebrated fashion designers of his generation before his own death in 2021. --- ## The Gold Cover Nobody Saw There is one final detail worth knowing about. This is the cover you know, but it was not the only version that existed. The gold cover without the red tape reveals that the gold actually forms two faces splitting apart from each other; one representing Jesus and one representing Kanye. This would be consistent with the Yeezus theme, a portmanteau of Ye from Kanye and Ezus in reference to Jesus. The gold faces were purportedly inspired by artist George Condo's Mental States collection, which featured a series of golden busts with varied expressions. George Condo again. The same artist who painted the cover of MBDTF. Appearing in the DNA of Yeezus even though his work never made the final version. --- ## What The Cover Actually Says I looked at the cover of *Yeezus* and moved on. I thought it was Kanye being Kanye. Provocative for the sake of provocation. I was half right. It was Kanye being Kanye. Kanye is always being Kanye. But Kanye being Kanye at his most stripped-down, most minimal, most deliberately contrary, produced something that is genuinely extraordinary when you understand its context. Ironically, the characteristics (or lack thereof) brilliantly mimic the tone of the album. Sonically, Yeezus differs drastically from West's traditionally warm and polished sound, instead offering a chaotic array of unfiltered digital noise. The cover embraces the album's CD-ness completely. The cover and the music are the same thing. Both stripped back. Both raw. Both deliberately difficult. Both making you work before they give you anything. Yeezus was the most critically acclaimed album of 2013 according to Metacritic, topping numerous end-of-year lists. [Rolling Stone included it on its 2020 list](https://www.artbeforenoise.com/to-pimp-a-butterfly-kendrick-lamar-album-cover/) of the 500 Greatest Albums of All Time. The most acclaimed album of 2013 had no cover. Sometimes nothing says everything. ## More from Kanye West [MBDTF: The Story Behind Kanye West’s Iconic CoverMy Beautiful Dark Twisted Fantasy by Kanye West - I thought it was just Kanye being Kanye. It was.![](https://www.artbeforenoise.com/content/images/icon/new-box-logo-on-white-cab11038-093a-47fe-9e6e-12610461a1b7.png)Art Before NoiseCraig![](https://www.artbeforenoise.com/content/images/thumbnail/My-Beautiful-Dark-Twisted-Fantasy-by-Kanye-West-Header-1-c507bd06-9008-40ac-8ece-511cfe8f0443.png)](https://www.artbeforenoise.com/mbdtf-kanye-west-album-cover/) ### Cover To Cover URL: https://www.artbeforenoise.com/album-covers-that-reference-other-covers/ Last updated: 2026-07-15T13:00:03.000Z Music has always been a conversation. [Artists sample each other](https://www.youtube.com/@tracklib?ref=artbeforenoise.com). They cover each other's songs. They borrow chord progressions, production techniques and lyrical ideas; sometimes consciously, sometimes not. It's how art works. Nothing is made in a vacuum. And sometimes that conversation happens on the cover before you've heard a single note. These are eight album covers that are talking directly to another album cover. Some are deliberate tributes. Some are knowing winks. Some are coincidences so perfect they feel impossible. --- ## London Calling - The Clash (1979) *References: Elvis Presley - Elvis Presley (1956)* ![](https://www.artbeforenoise.com/content/images/2026/05/London-Calling---The-Clash---Album-Cover.jpg) ![](https://www.artbeforenoise.com/content/images/2026/05/Elvis-Presley-Album-Cover-1.png) Both covers use pink and green text that borders the left and bottom sides of the album cover with a black and white photo in the background. Presley's debut showed him singing his heart out at a microphone. The Clash replaced him with a famous shot of Paul Simonon smashing his bass on the ground. Same colours. Same layout. Completely different energy. The tribute is deliberate and layered. The Clash were simultaneously honouring the spirit of early rock and roll and announcing its destruction. The *London Calling* cover simultaneously pays tribute to Elvis Presley while also blowing up his version of rock and roll. The King probably never smashed a bass guitar on stage. That's precisely the point. --- ## Sgt. Pepper's Lonely Hearts Club Band - The Beatles (1967) *Referenced by: Their Satanic Majesties Request - The Rolling Stones (1967)* ![](https://www.artbeforenoise.com/content/images/2026/05/Hidden-features-on-The-Beatles-Sgt-Peppers-Lonely-Hearts-Club-Band-album-cover.jpg) ![](https://www.artbeforenoise.com/content/images/2026/05/Their-Satanic-Majesties-Request---The-Rolling-Stones-Album-Cover.jpg) We've touched on this one before on Art Before Noise, in the [Look Closer](https://www.artbeforenoise.com/album-covers-hidden-details/) post, but it deserves its full moment here. Photographer Michael Cooper shot both covers in 1967\. When he shot *Their Satanic Majesties Request* for The Rolling Stones, he hid the faces of all four Beatles in the flowers on the cover. It was The Stones' response to being parodied by their greatest rivals, hidden in a floral arrangement. A game of visual tennis, played across two of 1967's greatest sleeves. Cooper was the net. --- ## Demon Days - Gorillaz (2005) *References: Let It Be - The Beatles (1970)* ![](https://www.artbeforenoise.com/content/images/2026/05/Gorillaz---Demon-Days-Album-Cover-1.jpg) ![](https://www.artbeforenoise.com/content/images/2026/05/Let-it-Be---The-Beatles---Album-Cover.jpg) The four quadrant portrait approach of *Demon Days* harkens back to the classic cover of The Beatles' final album *Let It Be*. Damon Albarn is of course too much of a music nerd not to have noticed the connection, and certainly Jamie Hewlett would have known the graphic similarities, but both have yet to officially comment on the matter. Four faces. Four quadrants. A virtual band paying silent tribute to the greatest band in history. Confirmation isn't necessary; it would be stupider if it wasn't an intentional homage. --- ## Kamikaze - Eminem (2018) *References: Licensed to Ill - Beastie Boys (1986)* ![](https://www.artbeforenoise.com/content/images/2026/05/Kamikaze---Eminem---Album-Cover.jpg) ![](https://www.artbeforenoise.com/content/images/2026/05/License-to-Ill-Album-Cover.jpg) Eminem's sleeve depicting a kamikaze piloted plane in mid explosion obviously tips its hat to the Beastie Boys' 1986 debut Licensed to Ill, its cover painted with a similar disaster bound aircraft. We've already written about the Licensed to Ill cover on this blog, [Hold It Up To A Mirror](https://www.artbeforenoise.com/licensed-to-ill-beastie-boys-album-cover/), and the Beastie Boys connection runs deep for Eminem. Eminem told Rolling Stone: "There was something about Licensed to Ill… 'Fuck you. We fucking curse. We spit beer.' And obviously as they got older their views and things changed, as all of ours do… Same as me." Two planes. Two eras. One conversation about what it means to be an outsider making noise. --- ## The Next Day - David Bowie (2013) *References: Heroes — David Bowie (1977)* ![](https://www.artbeforenoise.com/content/images/2026/05/David-Bowie---Heroes-Album-Cover.jpg) ![](https://www.artbeforenoise.com/content/images/2026/05/David-Bowie---The-Next-Day-Album-Cover.jpg) This one is unique - an artist referencing himself. The sleeve designed by Jonathan Barnbrook called up the much beloved *Heroes* cover art, if only to obscure most of it with a white box bearing the album's title, the original legend Heroes simply scratched off. Bowie returning from a decade's silence and literally crossing out his own most celebrated album cover. Not erasing it, the image is still visible beneath the white rectangle. Just placing something new on top of it. A man in conversation with his own past. Refusing to be defined by it. That is the most Bowie thing imaginable. --- ## Turbulent Indigo - Joni Mitchell (1994) *References: Self Portrait With Bandaged Ear - Vincent Van Gogh (1889)* ![](https://www.artbeforenoise.com/content/images/2026/05/Turbulent-Indigo---Joni-Mitchell-Album-Cover.jpg) ![](https://www.artbeforenoise.com/content/images/2026/05/Self-Portrait-With-Bandaged-Ear---Vincent-Van-Gogh.jpg) No one person better embodies the myth of the anguished artist, suffering and bleeding for his art, than Vincent Van Gogh. Joni Mitchell painted herself as Van Gogh for the cover of Turbulent Indigo, bandaged ear and all. Mitchell is a serious painter as well as a serious musician. The self portrait on the Turbulent Indigo cover is not a casual reference; it's a fully realised work of art that places her in direct conversation with the most celebrated anguished artist in history. A woman claiming Van Gogh's mythology as her own. Bold doesn't begin to cover it. --- ## Meet the Residents - The Residents (1974) *References: Meet the Beatles - The Beatles (1964)* ![](https://www.artbeforenoise.com/content/images/2026/05/The-Residents---Meet-the-Residents.jpg) ![](https://www.artbeforenoise.com/content/images/2026/05/Meet-the-Beatles---The-Beatles.jpg) While Meet The Residents takes a scrawling Pop Art swing at the classic Beatles album, other bands such as The Gorillaz, The Mothers of Invention, Booker T and the MGs, Blur and Utopia have all taken a crack at paying their visual respects. The Residents were an anonymous avant garde collective who refused to reveal their identities; their faces always hidden behind giant eyeball masks. Their debut album took the famous close cropped Beatles portrait and replaced the Fab Four with something altogether more unsettling. A parody, yes. But also a genuine piece of conceptual art about fame, identity and the cult of the rock star. --- ## The Heart of Saturday Night - Tom Waits (1974) *References: In the Wee Small Hours - Frank Sinatra (1955)* ![](https://www.artbeforenoise.com/content/images/2026/05/Tom-Waits---The-Heart-of-Saturday-Night-Album-Cover.jpg) ![](https://www.artbeforenoise.com/content/images/2026/05/In-the-Wee-Small-Hours---Frank-Sinatra-Album-Cover.jpg) In order to firmly establish his connection with jazz, Waits decided to pay homage to Frank Sinatra's *In the Wee Small Hours*. Waits doesn't have the blue eyed soul of Sinatra, as his inner demons are far too omnipresent, but it's fun to think of an alternate universe where Waits is croaking out My Way in Vegas. A young Tom Waits, still finding his voice, still figuring out what kind of artist he was going to be, placing himself in visual conversation with the Chairman of the Board. The ambition is staggering. The cheek is magnificent. And the cover works because Waits, even then, had enough personality to hold his own in Sinatra's shadow. --- Spotted a cover conversation I missed? Let everyone know in the comments. ### Eight Covers. One Secret Pattern URL: https://www.artbeforenoise.com/eight-covers-one-secret-pattern/ Last updated: 2026-07-13T13:05:30.000Z ![](https://www.artbeforenoise.com/content/images/2026/05/Blink-182-ALbum-Covers-Reviewed-2.png) Three guys from San Diego who named themselves after an Irish techno band's legal threat, appended a random number, and spent the next thirty years making some of the most infectiously fun music in the history of pop punk. The band were initially known as Blink until an Irish techno band threatened legal action. They appended "-182" randomly. They then proceeded to make up many reasons for the number, including the number of times Al Pacino said the word 'fuck' in Scarface, and Mark Hoppus' goal weight. That's Blink-182 in a nutshell. Chaos with a hook. Their album covers tell that story perfectly. And hiding across all of them, for most of the band's career, is a secret that nobody noticed for years. Let's start at the beginning and work our way through. --- ## Cheshire Cat (1995) ![Blink-182 - Cheshire Cat](https://www.artbeforenoise.com/content/images/2026/05/Blink-182---Cheshire-Cat.jpg) The debut. A grinning cartoon cat against a plain background, loose, and slightly chaotic. It looks exactly like what it is: three teenagers from Southern California with no budget, a lot of energy and a very fast drummer. The band emerged from the suburban, Southern California skate punk scene and first gained notoriety for high-energy live shows and irreverent lyrical toilet humour. The Cheshire Cat cover captures that perfectly; it's irreverent, it's slightly odd, and it doesn't take itself remotely seriously. The album title begins with the letter C. File that away. It will become important. [Become a cat person](https://amzn.to/4uMnJ9j?ref=artbeforenoise.com). Add it to your collection. --- ## Dude Ranch (1997) ![Blink-182 Dude Ranch Album Cover](https://www.artbeforenoise.com/content/images/2026/05/Blink-182-Dude-Ranch-Album-Cover.jpg) A cow standing, looking back at the camera. The band name scrawled in a red font. The whole thing slightly washed out and sun-bleached, like a polaroid left on a dashboard too long. It's unpretentious and slightly ridiculous, again, is exactly right for Blink-182 in 1997\. Dude Ranch was the band's first to chart on the Billboard 200 and featured their first radio hit, "Dammit." A band on the cusp of something bigger, still presenting themselves with the aesthetic of a band going absolutely nowhere in particular. The album title begins with the letter D. Join the [Dude Ranch](https://amzn.to/4tUKztZ?ref=artbeforenoise.com). --- ## Enema of the State (1999) ![Blink-182 - Enema of the State Album Cover](https://www.artbeforenoise.com/content/images/2026/05/Blink-182---Enema-of-the-State-Album-Cover.jpg) And here is where Blink-182 became enormous. And here is where their album covers became genuinely iconic. The cover art famously features adult film actress Janine Lindemulder in a nurse uniform. Red bra visible beneath the white coat. Blue latex glove being snapped into place. Bright blue eyeshadow. Red lipstick. A blue butterfly tattoo on her arm. Staring directly at the camera. The band were unaware of Lindemulder's profession when they selected her from a pile of photos. It was producer Jerry Finn who informed them. Their response was essentially, perfect. The album was going to be called Turn Your Head and Cough until almost the last minute, which is why the glove concept exists. "Obviously an enema is not really a glove type of thing," photographer David Goldman later noted. "I thought it was a good visual." The American Red Cross later pressured the band to remove the red cross from the nurse's hat, stating that if they did not, they would be in violation of the Geneva Conventions. Blink-182 and the [Geneva Conventions](https://www.artbeforenoise.com/beatles-butcher-cover-yesterday-and-today/). A sentence nobody expected to write in 1999. The cover was ranked number 69, appropriately, in [Billboard's 100 Greatest Album Covers of All Time](https://www.billboard.com/photos/best-album-covers-of-all-time-6715351/32-14-blink-182-enema-of-the-state-1999-album-art-billboard-1240/?ref=artbeforenoise.com). The album title begins with the letter E. [Add Enema of the State to your collection](https://amzn.to/4v3DiJ4?ref=artbeforenoise.com). --- ## Take Off Your Pants and Jacket (2001) ![Take Off Your Pants and Jacket Album Cover](https://www.artbeforenoise.com/content/images/2026/05/Blink-182---Take-Off-Your-Pants-and-Jacket-Album-Cover.jpg) The fourth album. The one that went to number one in the United States, Canada and Germany. And the cover is all black. A plane icon, pair of pants and a jacket. No people. No drama. Just the thing the album told you to take off. It's so straightforward it almost loops back around to being a statement. The album reached number one on the US Billboard 200 in its first week, selling more than 350,000 copies. A cover with [almost no visual information](https://www.artbeforenoise.com/album-covers-no-text/) whatsoever went to number one in three countries. Remarkable. The album title begins with the letter T. The pattern has skipped some letters; but look at the prominent letter on each cover. C. D. E. T. The alphabet sequence, it turns out, doesn't follow the album title, it follows a different rule entirely. More on that in a moment. [Take Off Your Pants](https://amzn.to/4v196yo?ref=artbeforenoise.com) and add it to your collection. --- ## Blink-182 (2003) ![Blink-182 - Self Titled Album Cover](https://www.artbeforenoise.com/content/images/2026/05/Blink-182---Self-Titled-Album-Cover.jpg) The self-titled. The one where everything changed. Recorded throughout 2003, Blink-182 marks a departure from the band's earlier work, infusing experimental elements into their usual pop punk sound, inspired by lifestyle changes; the band members all became fathers before the album was released. The cover reflects that shift immediately; darker, more abstract, more considered. A shadowy figure. Muted colours. A long way from a grinning Cheshire Cat or a nurse snapping a latex glove. It features a collaboration with The Cure frontman Robert Smith. Robert Smith on a Blink-182 album. The cover told you something was different before you heard a note. Add this one to your collection. [Grab it from Amazon](https://amzn.to/4fBAI8K?ref=artbeforenoise.com). --- ## Neighborhoods (2011) ![](https://www.artbeforenoise.com/content/images/2026/05/Blink-182---Neighborhoods-Album-Cover.jpg) Eight years. A hiatus. A reunion. And a cover that looks like it was designed by committee. Given the fractured recording process, it essentially was. Neighborhoods was their first album of new material in eight years, following the band's breakup and later reconciliation. The band members [recorded their parts separately](https://www.artbeforenoise.com/rumours-fleetwood-mac-album-cover/). The cover is fine. It's competent. It's not memorable in the way that Enema was memorable. The music inside was better than the packaging suggested. Move in to the [Neighborhoods](https://amzn.to/43ofCU3?ref=artbeforenoise.com). --- ## California (2016) ![Blink-182 California Album Cover](https://www.artbeforenoise.com/content/images/2026/05/Blink-182-California-Album-Cover.jpg) Tom DeLonge had left. Matt Skiba of Alkaline Trio was in. And the California cover; a car interior, a hand on the wheel, a highway stretching ahead is a deliberate visual reset. Fresh start. New chapter. Eyes on the road. It works as a metaphor even if it doesn't quite work as a cover. California marked the departure of founding member Tom DeLonge and the addition of Matt Skiba, and reached number one on the Billboard 200\. [Move to California](https://amzn.to/49eXGib?ref=artbeforenoise.com) and add this to your playlist. --- ## Nine (2019) ![Blink-182 - Nine album cover](https://www.artbeforenoise.com/content/images/2026/05/Blink-182---Nine-album-cover.jpg) Bright. Colourful. A big shift from some of the previous album covers. Nine debuted at number three on the Billboard 200 and reached top ten in several countries. The cover suits the album's darker and more introspective tone; a band processing difficult things and not hiding it. [Add Nine to your collection](https://amzn.to/4dBxKi4?ref=artbeforenoise.com). --- ## One More Time... (2023) ![Blink-182 - Album Cover for One More Time](https://www.artbeforenoise.com/content/images/2026/05/Blink-182-One-More-Time-Album-Cover.jpg) Tom DeLonge back. The original trio reunited. And a cover that features three figures, together, mug-shot style imagery. The whole thing suggesting a band that has been through everything and come out the other side. One More Time... was the first record featuring the iconic lineup together again; Mark Hoppus, Tom DeLonge and Travis Barker. It reached number one on the Billboard 200\. The cover earns its warmth because the story behind the reunion, Hoppus's cancer diagnosis, DeLonge's return, years of complicated friendships is moving. For once, the cover does justice to the emotional weight of the music inside. [Grab One More Time](https://amzn.to/4e52sR5?ref=artbeforenoise.com). --- ## The Secret Pattern This is the thing nobody noticed for years. Hidden across the early Blink-182 album covers is a secret alphabetical pattern. Cheshire Cat begins with C. Dude Ranch with D. Enema of the State with E. Take Off Your Pants and Jacket prominently features T. Blink-182 features B. The pattern, running through the band's early discography, was an [easter egg](https://www.artbeforenoise.com/album-covers-hidden-details/) hiding in plain sight across five albums. By the time California was released, Mark Hoppus acknowledged that the pattern had been abandoned. Early versions of the California artwork apparently contained a subtle reference to the letter L, scratches on a car window, but it was removed in the final design. A secret alphabet. Running through the covers of one of the biggest pop punk bands in history. If only it continued through all the albums. Where would it have ended? ### The Lawn They Built URL: https://www.artbeforenoise.com/to-pimp-a-butterfly-kendrick-lamar-album-cover/ Last updated: 2026-08-30T11:59:57.000Z I remember when I first heard King Kunta on Triple J. I was in the car. It was awesome. By the end of the day I had to buy the album. By the end of the week I had played it on repeat more times than I could count. I never actually really looked at the cover. Not properly. I knew there was a group of men in front of the White House. I should have looked harder. Because the cover of [*To Pimp A Butterfly*](https://amzn.to/3PKMEui?ref=artbeforenoise.com) is not just striking. It is one of the most carefully constructed, most politically loaded, most deliberately layered album covers of the 21st century. [![](https://www.artbeforenoise.com/content/images/2026/05/To-Pimp-a-Butterfly---Kendrick-Lamar.jpg)](https://amzn.to/3PKMGSW?ref=artbeforenoise.com) --- ## The Photograph The cover displays a black-and-white photo by French photographer Denis Rouvre of a house party outside of the White House. But calling it a house party photograph is like calling [*Guernica*](https://www.pablopicasso.org/guernica.jsp?ref=artbeforenoise.com) a war sketch. The description is technically accurate and completely insufficient. While Top Dawg Entertainment confirmed that the concept was conceived entirely by Kendrick and manager Dave Free, they tapped renowned French photographer Denis Rouvre to bring the vision to life. Rouvre's background lends even more context to the weighted image; since 1992, Rouvre has split time shooting portraits of world famous celebrities and anonymous ordinaries from all walks of life. He won a World Press Photo award for his portraits of Japanese tsunami survivors. A World Press Photo award winner. Chosen deliberately. To photograph a group of young Black men from Compton celebrating on the White House lawn. The choice of a French photographer to document this specifically American moment is itself a statement; an outsider's eye on the most inside of American institutions. --- ## The People All the people on the album cover with Kendrick are friends and family from where he grew up in Compton. The cover represents him [sharing his experiences](https://www.artbeforenoise.com/3-feet-high-and-rising-de-la-soul-album-cover/) with them. Many of them were part of his stories on [good kid, m.A.A.d city](https://open.spotify.com/album/748dZDqSZy6aPXKcI9H80u?si=c39e6743ab914dc7&ref=artbeforenoise.com). In his own words to Mass Appeal: "Just taking a group of homies who haven't seen the world and putting them in these places that they haven't necessarily seen… and them being excited about it." That sentence is doing an enormous amount of work. *Homies who haven't seen the world.* *Places they haven't necessarily seen.* The White House; the seat of American power, built in part by enslaved African Americans, reimagined as a place where the people it was built to exclude could celebrate, drink, hold cash and feel at home. D.C. commissioners in 1792 planned to import workers from Europe but response was dismal, so they turned to African-Americans, enslaved and free, to provide the bulk of labour that built the White House, the United States Capitol, and other early government buildings. The men celebrating on the cover of [*To Pimp A Butterfly*](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/To%5FPimp%5Fa%5FButterfly?ref=artbeforenoise.com) are standing on a [lawn that their ancestors built](https://www.artbeforenoise.com/nine-inch-nails-downward-spiral-album-cover/). That is not an accident. Nothing on this cover is an accident. --- ## The Judge Now look more carefully at the bottom of the image. There, beneath the feet of the celebrating men, is a body. A white man in a suit. Lying face down on the White House lawn. ![The judge on the White House lawn on the cover of To Pimp a Butterfly by Kendrick Lamar](https://www.artbeforenoise.com/content/images/2026/05/To-Pimp-a-Butterfly---Kendrick-Lamar---The-Judge.jpg) The Judge Kendrick explained the significance of the dead judge directly: the people standing over him are good people who are products of their environment, and that a judge would have them represented negatively. The judge makes time. He gives sentences. He is a relentless machine working against the rights of Black citizens. And on this cover, he is face down on the lawn. Not killed. Not celebrated in death. Simply, removed from power. Beneath the feet of the people he would have judged. The white judge keeled over is icing on the cake. A bunch of Black men posing in front of the White House like it's a house in the hood speaks volumes about America's original public housing project. It's just another house we don't own so fuck it. --- ## The Blurred Finger Here is the detail that most people never notice until someone points it out. A closer examination reveals a kid with a blurred-out middle finger, which just happens to be right above one of those odious "[parental advisory - explicit content](https://www.artbeforenoise.com/lovesexy-prince-album-cover/)" labels. A deliberately blurred middle finger, positioned directly above the parental advisory sticker, on an album cover photographed by a World Press Photo winner, in front of the White House, with a dead judge at their feet. Every single element of this cover was chosen. The blur was a choice. The positioning was a choice. The message is impossible to miss once you see it, and impossible to [prove was intentional](https://www.artbeforenoise.com/album-covers-with-mistakes/), which is precisely how it was designed. ![The Blurred Finger on the Cover of To Pimp a Butterfly by Kendrick Lamar](https://www.artbeforenoise.com/content/images/2026/05/The-Blurred-Finger-on-the-Cover-of-To-Pimp-a-Butterfly-by-Kendrick-Lamar.png) The Finger --- ## Obama It is impossible to talk about this cover without talking about Barack Obama. To Pimp a Butterfly was released in 2015, the penultimate year of former president Barack Obama's second consecutive term in office. Obama's cultural impact as the first Black president paved the way for the cover to become one of the most powerfully symbolic pieces of iconography of the Obama era. With Obama in the Oval Office, there was finally a bridge that many people thought to be unattainable, and in this same way the cover is symbolic of Obama's invitation of rap and Blackness into the White House. The mutual admiration between Lamar and Obama is well documented. In a live [YouTube Q&A where Obama was asked who between Lamar and Drake](https://www.washingtonpost.com/video/politics/obama-weighs-in-on-drake-and-kendrick-lamar/2016/01/15/b8eeec52-bbee-11e5-85cd-5ad59bc19432%5Fvideo.html?ref=artbeforenoise.com) would win in a rap battle, he chose Lamar and has gone on record several times to declare his praise for TPAB. Kendrick reflected on the moment their worlds officially met: "I sat down with President Barack Obama and shared the same views." A rapper from Compton. The President of the United States. Sharing the same views. In the White House. The cover had already imagined exactly this. --- ## What The Cover Actually Says Here is what I think about the cover of *To Pimp A Butterfly* now, as someone who heard King Kunta on [Triple J](https://www.abc.net.au/triplej?ref=artbeforenoise.com) and bought the album without really looking at the image on the front. It is a cover that asks a question. Everybody's either preparing for the revolution or celebrating a victory, which makes it deliciously ambiguous. Is this the before? Or the after? Kendrick and his homies on the White House lawn; are they about to take power, or have they already taken it? The image doesn't tell you. It holds both possibilities simultaneously. And that ambiguity is the most powerful thing about it. In Rolling Stone's updated list of the [500 Greatest Albums of All Time](https://www.rollingstone.com/music/music-lists/500-greatest-albums-of-all-time-156826/?ref=artbeforenoise.com), To Pimp A Butterfly was ranked 19th. A album released in 2015, already sitting at number nineteen in the [greatest albums ever made](https://www.artbeforenoise.com/nevermind-nirvana-album-cover/). The cover that goes with it is equally extraordinary. ### I See Us URL: https://www.artbeforenoise.com/horses-patti-smith-album-cover/ Last updated: 2026-08-15T02:32:06.000Z Why is the cover of [*Horses* by Patti Smith](https://amzn.to/4fxUTo5?ref=artbeforenoise.com) important? Why is it celebrated? What is it about a black and white photograph of a woman in a white shirt, jacket slung over her shoulder, staring directly at the camera, that makes it one of the most significant album covers in music history? I'm not a huge Patti Smith fan. I respect her enormously but her music isn't something I reach for. So I came to this cover the same way I come to all the covers on this blog; with curiosity rather than reverence. And what I found is a story about friendship, about identity, about a single afternoon in a New York apartment, and about why one photograph can change what it means to be a [woman on an album cover](https://www.artbeforenoise.com/renaissance-beyonce-album-cover/). ![](https://www.artbeforenoise.com/content/images/2026/05/Patti-Smith---Horses-Album.jpg) --- ## New York, 1975 Patti Smith always knew [Robert Mapplethorpe](https://www.tate.org.uk/art/artists/robert-mapplethorpe-11413/photographs-robert-mapplethorpe?ref=artbeforenoise.com) would shoot the album cover for Horses. Their friendship was so extraordinary and his reputation as a photographer was skyrocketing. Smith and Mapplethorpe had met in New York in the mid 1960s and formed one of the great creative partnerships in American art history. They had lived together, loved each other, supported each other through poverty and obscurity, and emerged on the other side as two of the most significant artistic figures of their generation. By 1975 Mapplethorpe was one of the most talked about photographers in New York. Smith was about to release her debut album. There was never any question about who would shoot the cover. Mapplethorpe chose [Sam Wagstaff's](https://www.frieze.com/article/other-eye-sam-wagstaff?ref=artbeforenoise.com) penthouse apartment on Fifth Avenue as the location for the shoot. Wagstaff was a private art collector and one of the first to collect photography seriously in the early 1970s. The apartment was large, had white walls and was bathed in natural light. Before the shoot, the two of them ate eggs and grits at the Pink Tea Cup cafe in the West Village. A last meal before history. --- ## The Shirt The only thing Mapplethorpe asked of Smith was that she wear a clean shirt with no stains on it. That shirt was specifically selected from the Bowery Salvation Army; a white button down with the monogram RV embroidered on the breast pocket. Smith chose it hoping it had belonged to [Roger Vadim](https://www.artbeforenoise.com/album-covers-hidden-details/), the French director who had filmed Barbarella with Jane Fonda in 1967. A shirt from the Salvation Army. A monogram she hoped belonged to a French film director. On the cover of one of the most celebrated albums in music history. The one she chose had an RV embroidered on the breast pocket, which she says reminded her of the movie Barbarella. Full of references, as she would later say. Always full of references. --- ## Twelve Photographs The shoot itself was brief. Twelve pictures were taken. One of which was used as Smith's album cover. Smith tried several poses. Nothing felt right. And then, she flung her jacket over her shoulder, Frank Sinatra style. That was the one. A gesture borrowed from the Chairman of the Board, captured by one of America's greatest photographers, in a penthouse apartment on Fifth Avenue, wearing a Salvation Army shirt with someone else's initials on it. There was no discussion about what the resulting image should look like or what they would do. Smith had her look in mind. She knew. Mapplethorpe knew. Twelve photographs. One afternoon. One jacket over one shoulder. --- ## Why It Mattered And now, the answer to the question. Why is this cover important? In 1975 the music industry had very specific ideas about what a [woman on an album cover](https://www.artbeforenoise.com/brat-charli-xcx-album-cover/) should look like. Glamorous. Sexualised. Soft. Approachable. The female artist as an object of desire rather than a subject of power. The cover of *Horses* is none of those things. Smith stands against a white wall in a men's shirt, braces visible, jacket over her shoulder, looking directly at the camera with an expression that contains absolutely no interest in your approval. The tensile strength of Smith's brash androgyny is resolutely laid bare. She is not performing femininity for the camera. She is not inviting you in. She is simply there; present, powerful, entirely herself. Smith was full of references. Mapplethorpe was full of light and shadow. The result was an image that said something the music industry hadn't heard before; that a woman could stand on an album cover exactly as she was, without apology or performance, and be magnificent. It was 1975\. That was radical. In some corners of the music industry, it still would be. --- ## The Cover Lives In Museums The cover of Horses is now in the permanent collection at [MoMA in New York](https://www.artbeforenoise.com/massive-attack-album-covers/); a lithograph, 12 by 12 inches. It also lives in the collection at the Getty Museum in Los Angeles and the National Galleries of Scotland in Edinburgh. A photograph taken in an afternoon, in twelve frames, of a woman in a Salvation Army shirt, is now considered one of the great works of twentieth century photography. Apart from his self portraits, Smith was Mapplethorpe's most photographed subject. He shot the cover of her 1988 album *Dream of Life* too. Two covers across thirteen years. A friendship that produced some of the most extraordinary images in American photography. Mapplethorpe died of AIDS related complications in March 1989\. He was 42. ![](https://www.artbeforenoise.com/content/images/2026/05/Patti-Smith---Dream-of-Life-Album.jpg) --- ## I Never See Me. I See Us. Smith wrote about the cover of *Horses* in her memoir [*Just Kids*](https://amzn.to/49YrBeC?ref=artbeforenoise.com)*;* one of the great books about friendship and art and New York and youth. And she said something about looking at the cover now that stops you cold. "When I look at it now, I never see me. I see us." That is why this cover matters. Not because of the shirt or the jacket or the Frank Sinatra gesture or the Salvation Army monogram. Not because of the white walls of Sam Wagstaff's apartment or the natural light that Mapplethorpe waited so carefully for. Not even because of what it said about women and album covers and 1975. It matters because two people who loved each other made something true. And the camera caught it. And fifty years later you can still feel it in the image; the friendship, the trust, the complete absence of performance. That is what a great album cover does. It holds something real inside it. Something that survives the music, survives the era, survives everything. I never see me. I see us. ### The Disco Ball Horse URL: https://www.artbeforenoise.com/renaissance-beyonce-album-cover/ Last updated: 2026-08-09T13:11:20.000Z When I first saw the cover of [*Renaissance*](https://amzn.to/3PwaFp2?ref=artbeforenoise.com) on the internets in the summer of 2022 and my first thought was: well, this is different. A woman on a horse. A silver bodysuit. The whole thing glowing and otherworldly. I didn't quite know what to make of it. And then I asked myself a question that felt more interesting than the cover itself. What was I expecting? I couldn't answer that. Which told me something. It told me that Beyoncé had done exactly what the best album covers always do; she had made me stop. Made me look. Made me wonder. And made me ask questions I hadn't thought to ask before. It is covers like this one that made me want to create Art Before Noise. You can thank Beyoncé. ![Beyoncé wearing futuristic silver body jewelry, sitting majestically atop a glowing, translucent holographic horse against a dark background.](https://www.artbeforenoise.com/content/images/2026/05/Renaissance-by-Beyonce.jpg) Renaissance by Beyoncé --- ## The Horse Let's start with the horse. Because the horse is the thing everyone probably notices first. Maybe. Shot by Dutch photographer Carlijn Jacobs, the image depicts Beyoncé seated atop a mirrored disco ball horse, dubbed "Reneigh" by fans, while wearing a 3D printed silver bodysuit designed by Nusi Quero. The helix shaped piece is adorned with spikes and embellished with crystals. The horse is not real. It is a sculptural object. A holographic, crystalline, mirrored creation that sits somewhere between a fairground ride and a fine art installation. On June 30th, 2022 Beyoncé took to her social media accounts and revealed the captivating album art which featured a radiant, holographic crystal horse with herself seated atop it donning an outlandish futuristic bikini. The immediate reaction online was (predictably) a mixture of awe, confusion and delight. And then someone noticed something. --- ## Lady Godiva and Studio 54 Fans immediately noted on social media that the cover resembles a famous 19th century painting. The cover, which features a scantily clad Beyoncé astride a silvery horse, is strikingly similar to [John Collier's 1880 painting Lady Godiva](https://magnacanvas.com/en-au/blogs/news/lady-godiva-by-john-collier?ref=artbeforenoise.com), which depicts a naked woman from Anglo-Saxon mythology. According to legend, Lady Godiva rode a horse naked in the 11th century to protest her husband Leofric's plans to impose a harsh tax on the citizens of Coventry, England. A woman on a horse as an act of defiance. A woman on a horse as a statement of power. The parallel is hard to ignore. But there is a second reference, closer to home and closer to the album's themes. Critics postulated that the equestrian pose was likely inspired by images of [Bianca Jagger riding into Studio 54 on a white stallion](https://www.theguardian.com/music/2015/apr/25/bianca-jagger-i-did-not-ride-the-horse-into-studio-54-i-just-got-on-it?ref=artbeforenoise.com). Studio 54\. The legendary New York nightclub that opened in 1977 and became the epicentre of disco culture. A place where Black artists, queer communities, and the cultural avant-garde came together on a dancefloor and created something that changed popular music forever. That reference is not accidental. Nothing about Renaissance is accidental. --- ## What The Album Is Actually About To understand the cover of Renaissance you need to understand what the album itself is doing. Because the two are inseparable. Beyoncé conceived and recorded Renaissance during the COVID-19 pandemic, intending to inspire joy and escapism in listeners after a period of collective isolation. The album celebrates the club culture that served as a [refuge for Black and queer communities](https://www.artbeforenoise.com/to-pimp-a-butterfly-kendrick-lamar-album-cover/), and pays homage to the pioneers who shaped those spaces. Arranged like a continuous DJ mix, Renaissance incorporates post-1970s Black dance music styles, such as disco, house, and [funk](https://www.artbeforenoise.com/maggot-brain-funkadelic-album-cover/), and pays homage to the overlooked contributions of the pioneers who shaped those genres. In [Beyoncé's own words](https://www.instagram.com/p/Cfb3ddsFe2S/?ref=artbeforenoise.com): "Creating this album allowed me a place to dream and to find escape during a scary time for the world. It allowed me to feel free and adventurous in a time when little else was moving. My intention was to create a safe place, a place without judgment. A place to be free of perfectionism and overthinking. A place to scream, release, feel freedom." The cover, then, is not just an image. It is a visual manifesto. A woman on a horse; powerful, otherworldly, unapologetically present, announcing an album that is fundamentally about freedom. About dancing. About joy as an act of resistance. The glittering disco ball horse makes complete sense once you understand that. --- ## The Photographer [Carlijn Jacobs](https://carlijnjacobs.com/?ref=artbeforenoise.com) is a Dutch photographer whose work sits at the intersection of fashion, fine art and surrealism. She has shot campaigns for Dior, Prada and Valentino and her editorial work has appeared in Vogue, W Magazine and i-D. Her aesthetic; bold, sculptural, slightly otherworldly, is a perfect fit for what Renaissance required. This was not a cover that needed [naturalism or intimacy](https://www.artbeforenoise.com/horses-patti-smith-album-cover/). It needed grandeur. It needed something that felt like it existed in a slightly different universe from the one we inhabit. Jacobs delivered exactly that. The lighting, the angle, the way Beyoncé's bodysuit catches and reflects the crystalline surface of the horse; every element of the image feels considered and precise. This is not a happy accident. This is a photograph that knew exactly what it was doing. --- ## The Bodysuit The silver bodysuit deserves its own moment. Designed by [Nusi Quero](https://www.instagram.com/Nusi%5FQuero/?ref=artbeforenoise.com), a Los Angeles based designer known for his sculptural, body conscious work, the helix shaped piece is adorned with spikes and embellished with crystals. It is 3D printed. In 2022\. On the cover of one of the most anticipated albums in years. The [future of fashion](https://www.artbeforenoise.com/massive-attack-album-covers/) and the history of disco, occupying the same image simultaneously. Quero has spoken about the design as an extension of Beyoncé's body rather than something placed on top of it; a second skin that transforms rather than conceals. The spikes are not aggressive. They are armour. Protection. Power. A woman in armour on a disco ball horse. Referencing Lady Godiva and Bianca Jagger in the same breath. Making an album about Black queer club culture during a global pandemic. Once you see all of that, the cover looks completely different from your first glance. --- ## What The Cover Actually Says Here is the thing about the Renaissance cover. My first reaction was: well, this is different. And I couldn't tell you what I was expecting instead. Now I think that was the point. Beyoncé has spent her entire career defying expectations. Shifting from R&B to pop to country to disco without ever [losing the thread of what makes her singular](https://www.artbeforenoise.com/aladdin-sane-david-bowie-album-cover/). The Renaissance cover doesn't explain itself. It doesn't meet you halfway. It sits there on its disco ball horse, in its crystalline armour, and it waits for you to catch up. The Lady Godiva reference tells you this is about power. The [Studio 54 reference](https://www.artbeforenoise.com/thriller-michael-jackson-album-cover/) tells you this is about joy. The disco ball horse tells you this is about dancing your way through the difficult parts. And the 3D printed bodysuit tells you this is about the future; built from the past, worn on the body, pointed forward. I didn't know what I was expecting when I first saw this cover. I know now. I was expecting something ordinary. And Beyoncé has never done ordinary. ### Press. Ship. Regret. URL: https://www.artbeforenoise.com/album-covers-with-mistakes/ Last updated: 2026-08-15T03:39:03.000Z Nobody sets out to make a mistake. Not the designer staying up late to finish a sleeve. Not the executive signing off on the artwork. Not the secretary answering the phone. And yet sometimes, through a misread note, a [hurried spell check](https://www.artbeforenoise.com/siamese-dream-smashing-pumpkins-album-cover/), or a geography lesson nobody thought to take, something slips through. Something wrong ends up [pressed onto a million copies](https://www.artbeforenoise.com/eight-covers-one-secret-pattern/) of an album and [sent out into the world](https://www.artbeforenoise.com/beatles-butcher-cover-yesterday-and-today/) forever. These are five of the best. --- ## No Answer - Electric Light Orchestra (1972) ![](https://www.artbeforenoise.com/content/images/2026/05/No-Answer---Electric-Light-Orchestra.jpg) The greatest accidental album title in music history begins with a phone call that nobody answered. When United Artists was preparing to schedule Electric Light Orchestra's debut album for release in the US, someone from the label placed a call to find out, among other things, what the LP should be titled. The caller, having failed to reach the desired party, jotted down the notation "no answer"; a phrase which was mistaken for an album title and assigned to the US version of the group's debut record. Bev Bevan, ELO's drummer, confirmed the story. The American record company phoned to discuss the title with ELO manager Don Arden, but his secretary couldn't contact him and replied with the two words that became immortalised on the album sleeves. "It was quite a good title, though, wasn't it?" says Bevan. Nobody planned it. Nobody approved it. A secretary left a note. And Electric Light Orchestra's debut album went out in America under a title the band never chose, never discussed, and never quite got around to correcting. Add No Answer to your collection - [Amazon has it for you](https://amzn.to/4dKabnt?ref=artbeforenoise.com). --- ## Untitled - The Byrds (1970) ![](https://www.artbeforenoise.com/content/images/2026/05/The-Byrds---Untitled.jpg) Here is the remarkable footnote to the ELO story. In an odd coincidence, a similar mix up at about the same time resulted in a Byrds LP mistakenly being released with a title of Untitled. Two bands. Two phone calls. Two accidental album titles. Within months of each other. Both released and never corrected. The Byrds' *Untitled* is actually a double album, one disc live, one disc studio, and the absence of a proper title gives it an accidental mystique it was never meant to have. Like a filing system that got out of hand. Like a Post-it note that ended up in the wrong meeting. Add Untitled by The Byrds to your collection - [Amazon](https://amzn.to/4uJLjCU?ref=artbeforenoise.com). --- ## Odessey and Oracle - The Zombies (1968) ![](https://www.artbeforenoise.com/content/images/2026/05/The-Zombies---Odessey-and-Oracle.jpg) One of the most celebrated albums of the psychedelic era has a spelling mistake right there in the title. And it has been there since 1968. The misspelling of "odyssey" in the title was the result of a mistake by the designer of the LP cover, Terry Quirk; a friend of bassist Chris White. The band tried to cover this up at the time of release by claiming the misspelling was intentional. They maintained that position for years. Fans online constructed elaborate theories about hidden meanings in the strange spelling. And then Quirk himself put the record straight on his own website: "I ended up spelling odyssey wrong, so that's my claim to fame. There's lots of theories online about why it's spelt wrong, but there's no conspiracy." No conspiracy. No hidden meaning. Just a designer who spelled odyssey wrong and a band too embarrassed to admit it for thirty years. [*Odessey and Oracle*](https://amzn.to/4wJwkuP?ref=artbeforenoise.com) is now widely regarded as one of the greatest albums ever made. The misspelling is part of its charm. Terry Quirk's claim to fame is secure. --- ## Loaded - The Velvet Underground (1970) ![](https://www.artbeforenoise.com/content/images/2026/05/Loaded---The-Velvet-Underground.jpg) The Velvet Underground's fourth album features artwork depicting the [Times Square subway station](https://www.artbeforenoise.com/album-covers-hidden-details/#3-the-velvet-undergroundwhite-lightwhite-heat-1968) entrance in New York. It is a evocative, perfectly chosen image for an album called *Loaded;* raw, urban, underground in every sense. And the word "downtown" on the artwork is spelled "dowtown." The artwork for the album, by Stanislaw Zagorski, features a drawing of the Times Square subway station entrance, with "downtown" misspelled as "dowtown". One letter. Missing. On one of the most important albums in the history of rock music. Pressed onto every copy. Shipped to every record store. Noticed, presumably, by someone. Corrected by nobody. Lou Reed was not known for suffering fools. Whether he noticed the missing T and simply didn't care, or whether it slipped past everyone entirely, has never been fully established. Either possibility feels completely in character for The Velvet Underground. [Grab Loaded by The Velvet Underground on Amazon](https://amzn.to/4uaIzid?ref=artbeforenoise.com). --- ## London Bridge - Fergie (2006) ![](https://www.artbeforenoise.com/content/images/2026/05/Fergie---London-Bridge.jpg) The final entry is less a music industry accident and more a geography lesson that a multi-million dollar production team collectively failed to take. On the artwork for her 2006 single "London Bridge," Fergie stands proudly in front of a famous London landmark. One small problem: that's Tower Bridge. Tower Bridge. Not London Bridge. Two different bridges. Separated by roughly half a mile of the River Thames. Distinguished by, among other things, the fact that Tower Bridge is the one with the towers. [London Bridge](https://maps.app.goo.gl/p7Hi4jBhxC49SmXv6?ref=artbeforenoise.com), for the record, is a fairly unremarkable concrete structure built in 1973\. It does not make for a striking single cover. Tower Bridge, with its Victorian Gothic towers and famous bascules, absolutely does. Which is presumably why someone chose it. They just chose the wrong name to go with it. --- *Spotted a mistake on an album cover we missed? Let me know in the comments.* ### The Birth of Prince URL: https://www.artbeforenoise.com/lovesexy-prince-album-cover/ Last updated: 2026-08-09T13:13:06.000Z When most people look at the cover of *Lovesexy,* Prince, naked, reclining on a white lily, gazing upward with a soft and entirely unbothered expression, they call it audacious. A provocative stunt. A deliberate attempt to shock. I don't see it that way. What I see is confidence. Way more confidence than I have. There is a difference between an artist who takes their clothes off to get attention and an artist who takes their clothes off because they [simply don't need your permission](https://www.artbeforenoise.com/eight-covers-one-secret-pattern/). Prince was always the latter. He never asked. He never explained. He just did exactly what he wanted, exactly when he wanted, and waited for the world to catch up. The cover of [*Lovesexy*](https://amzn.to/4eMn0jf?ref=artbeforenoise.com) is one of the purest expressions of that quality in his entire career. ![A soft-focus, pastel-toned photograph of Prince reclining nude inside the petals of a giant orchid against a pale sky.](https://www.artbeforenoise.com/content/images/2026/05/Lovesexy---Prince-Album-Cover.jpg) Lovesexy by Prince --- ## The Album That Almost Wasn't To understand *Lovesexy* you first need to understand what came before it. Because the story of this cover begins not with a flower or a photographer, but with a decision that shocked the entire music industry. In what was described as one of the most enjoyable and peculiar moves of the 1980s, Prince announced he would follow up the critically revered Sign o' the Times with The Black Album a.k.a. Spooky Electric (read: Satan). A raw, dark, funk heavy collection recorded in 1987. But then, a mere week before its scheduled release, he scrapped his plans and demanded that Warner Bros. destroy all copies of the album. Only one of the songs from that album, When 2 R in Love, would be saved, and within seven weeks Prince had recorded an entirely new collection of songs to join it. Why? Deep conversations with Ingrid Chavez revealed how scary it is not knowing who you are. If Spooky Electric (read: Satan) could get Prince to question his identity and only trust his feelings, he could get him to question anything. Rooting his identity in Lovesexy doesn't mean he won't struggle; it means he will have power in his struggle. The Black Album was the sound of Prince at his darkest. *Lovesexy* was his response to that darkness, an album about spirituality, positivity, love and God, recorded in seven weeks at his newly opened Paisley Park Studios in Minneapolis. It is consequently one of the fastest albums turned around from conception to retail in music history. And for an album about light overcoming darkness, he needed a cover that said something equally bold. --- ## Jean-Baptiste Mondino and The Birth of Venus Prince's first choice to direct his film *Under the Cherry Moon* had been Jean-Baptiste Mondino, a French fashion photographer and music video director whose work sat at the intersection of fine art and popular culture. Mondino had been unavailable for the film. For *Lovesexy*, he was available. And Prince called him. The cover is a montage combining close up flower photography with a nude portrait of the artist, who sits on the unfolding petals of a white lily, leaning back. Prince's gaze is lifted up and off to the left with a soft, thoughtful expression. The background of lilies and iris evoke the post-war religious iconography which Mondino cites as a source of inspiration. Mimicking The Birth of Venus by Botticelli, the cover shows Prince reclined naked with a lily stamen suggestively positioned above his groin. ![A classic Renaissance painting featuring the nude goddess Venus standing modestly in a large, open scallop shell as she floats ashore, flanked by the wind god Zephyrus on the left blowing her to land and a handmaiden on the right waiting to cover her with a floral cloak.](https://www.artbeforenoise.com/content/images/2026/05/image-2.png) Birth of Venus - [Wikipedia](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The%5FBirth%5Fof%5FVenus?ref=artbeforenoise.com) The Botticelli reference is not accidental. *The Birth of Venus,* painted around 1484-1486, depicts the goddess Venus emerging from the sea, naked and entirely unashamed. It is one of the most celebrated images in Western art history. It hangs in the Uffizi Gallery in Florence. Nobody wraps it in black plastic. Prince knew exactly what he was doing. A naked figure on a flower, gazing upward toward something divine, is not pornography. It is iconography. The cover of *Lovesexy* belongs in the same visual tradition as Botticelli, and Prince made sure you couldn't miss the connection. Prince had even denied Warner's management sight of the cover prior to the album's retail release. Warner Bros. found out about the cover the same way everyone else did. That tells you everything about Prince's relationship with his own creative vision. --- ## The Black Irony The cover caused exactly the reaction Prince knew it would. The image was deemed far too risqué for 1988 and prompted many retailers to [conceal the artwork under black plastic wrapping](https://www.artbeforenoise.com/wish-you-were-here-pink-floyd-album-cover/), with [Walmart refusing to stock it](https://www.artbeforenoise.com/mbdtf-kanye-west-album-cover/) at all. The album that replaced The Black Album was sold in black wrapping. Prince's response to his own darkness was covered in the very colour he had tried to escape. The singles Alphabet St. and Glam Slam were issued without artwork, their transparent sleeves labelled with a sticker, because Mondino's cover was the sole promotional image shot for the album, with no alternative shots available. One photograph. No alternatives. No backup plan. That was the cover and that was that. --- ## One Continuous Track The cover controversy was only one of the ways *Lovesexy* defied convention. Instead of letting fans skip to their favourite songs, Prince wanted them to press play and enjoy the ride. [Warner Bros](https://www.artbeforenoise.com/tag/warner-bros-records/). had to format the entire project as a 45 minute track. LP pressings split the album in two side-long tracks, without visual bands to indicate individual songs. Similarly, early CD copies have the entire album in sequence as a single track. An album you couldn't skip. A cover you couldn't display. An artist you couldn't second guess. --- ## What The Cover Actually Says The retailers who wrapped the *Lovesexy* cover in black plastic were responding to the nudity. They saw a naked man and reached for the packaging. But the nudity was never the point. Prince sitting atop an open flower while naked and apparently opening himself up to God is comparatively pretty wholesome when you think about it. This is an album about spirituality. About love as a divine force. About the battle between darkness and light. The naked figure on the flower is not provocative; it is vulnerable. Open. Reaching upward toward something greater than itself. It is an image that captures the album's essence of spirituality perfectly. The retailers covered it in black. Walmart refused to stock it. And *Lovesexy* reached number one in the UK, the Netherlands, Sweden, Switzerland and New Zealand. In April 2022 *Lovesexy* was exhibited at The Photographers' Gallery in London, staged in celebration of the art of iconic album designs. A cover that was hidden behind black plastic in 1988 ended up in a photography gallery in 2022\. Thirty four years later, the world finally caught up with Prince. He was always going to be right. He always knew it. That's not audacity. That's confidence. ### The Flame, The Beetle, The Bullet URL: https://www.artbeforenoise.com/massive-attack-album-covers/ Last updated: 2026-08-15T02:32:30.000Z When I first heard the name [Massive Attack](https://amzn.to/3QT84G7?ref=artbeforenoise.com) I assumed it was a metal band. Something loud. Something aggressive. Something that would make the neighbours knock on the wall. I was wrong about almost everything. I blame the album covers. That is the vibe they give off. Massive Attack are one of the most quietly extraordinary bands in the history of British music. And the word quietly is doing a lot of work there because everything about them, including their album covers, operates at a frequency that rewards attention rather than demands it. Nobody in their face. No photographs of the band. Just a series of powerful, considered, often beautiful emblems that build into one of the most coherent visual identities in modern music. I decided to find out more about those album covers. --- ## Blue Lines (1991) The debut. The one that invented trip hop before anyone had a name for it. And a cover so simple it almost disappears. ![](https://www.artbeforenoise.com/content/images/2026/07/Blue-Lines-Original-Cover.webp) ![](https://www.artbeforenoise.com/content/images/2026/07/Massive-Attack---Blue-Lines.jpg) "Attack" did not appear on original pressings due to the Persian Gulf War The band name and album title in Helvetica Black Oblique; bold, industrial, slightly tilted. And a large flame symbol at the top that Robert Del Naja, the band's visual brain and graffiti artist, effectively stole from a Stiff Little Fingers album sleeve. Del Naja has acknowledged the influence of the inflammable material logo used on the cover of Stiff Little Fingers' album Inflammable Material. They were the first band he'd ever seen live, back in Bristol in 1979\. There was sentiment in the theft. The record's fiery jacket art is known in health and safety booklets the world over as the symbol for combustible materials. A warning sign. A hazard marker. On a debut album. It was, in retrospect, exactly the right image; *Blue Lines* was combustible. It set something alight that is still burning. One important detail most people don't know: due to assumed sensitivities concerning the Persian Gulf War raging at the time of the album's completion, the initial pressings were released under the temporarily abbreviated band moniker "Massive." A ceasefire was declared and "Attack" was reincorporated for all subsequent pressings. The most important debut of the 1990s was briefly released without the word Attack. Add *Blue Lines* to your collection - [Grab it on Amazon](https://amzn.to/4tr8kte?ref=artbeforenoise.com) --- ## Protection (1994) Three years later. The flame returns, but something has changed. ![](https://www.artbeforenoise.com/content/images/2026/05/Massive-Attack---Protection.jpg) The album follows Blue Lines structurally, to the point that the font used on the cover is the same Helvetica Heavy Italic. The album cover also nods to Blue Lines, revealing a futuristic, impenetrable wall behind a mostly burned version of the previous album's artwork, implying that the depicted flammable gas had been ignited. The flame from *Blue Lines* has been lit. What remains is a wall; dark, impenetrable, slightly ominous. The cover of *Protection* is a direct conversation with its predecessor. A sequel in visual language. A band saying: we were there, this is what happened next. The Eurochild figure, a whimsical, slightly unsettling animated character, also appears on the cover, representing Europe and its disparate elements attempting to come together. Del Naja described him as "whimsical; you can take him seriously or just look at him as a cartoon character." Same font. Same flame. Different world. That continuity, the sense that each cover is part of a longer conversation, is what makes Massive Attack's visual language so distinctive. Are you beginning to see why I thought they were a metal band yet? Add Protection to your collection - [Its on Amazon](https://amzn.to/4ezE8Zj?ref=artbeforenoise.com) --- ## Mezzanine (1998) And then everything changed. ![](https://www.artbeforenoise.com/content/images/2026/05/Massive-Attack---Mezzanine.jpg) The album cover was a result of the first collaboration between Robert Del Naja, art director Tom Hingston and famed fashion photographer Nick Knight OBE. During the making of their third album, Del Naja had become fascinated by spiders, dreaming vividly of arachnids and the patterns on their backs. It led ultimately to the sleeve's stark gatefold black stag beetle on a white background, shot by Knight at the Natural History Museum in London. The final design was a composite of multiple shots. A beetle. Shot at the Natural History Museum. Born from dreams about spiders. On what many consider the greatest album Massive Attack ever made. Del Naja described it as "a chrysalis moment where we were trying to emerge as something different. We just wanted to firmly establish our own identity and I think Mezzanine was the opportunity to do that." The cover of *Mezzanine* now lives in the permanent collection at MoMA in New York. A black beetle on a white background, stark, precise, slightly threatening, sits alongside [Unknown Pleasures](https://www.artbeforenoise.com/unknown-pleasures-joy-division-album-cover/) and the [Thriller](https://www.artbeforenoise.com/thriller-michael-jackson-album-cover/) cover as one of the great pieces of album art of the modern era. And on the album's 20th anniversary, Massive Attack became the first band to encode an entire record in DNA, storing *Mezzanine* in synthetic DNA strands. Add Mezzanine to your collection - [Get it from Amazon](https://amzn.to/3PasQ3s?ref=artbeforenoise.com) --- ## 100th Window (2003) Nick Knight returned for the fourth album, but this time the image was more violent. ![](https://www.artbeforenoise.com/content/images/2026/05/100th-Window---Massive-Attack.jpg) Knight shot glass figures through with bullets for the cover of 100th Window. The resulting image; a shattered, translucent human form, exploding outward from a point of impact is one of the most viscerally striking covers in the Massive Attack catalogue. The album itself was a troubled one. Mushroom had left the band. Daddy G stepped back to raise his family. Del Naja was essentially alone, making a record in the aftermath of September 11, an event that fundamentally reshaped the album's tone. The September 11 attacks motivated Del Naja to depart from the original direction of the album. A glass figure shot through with a bullet. An album made by one man, alone, in the shadow of one of the most violent events in modern history. The cover and the record are inseparable. Tom Hingston described the visual philosophy connecting all four covers at this point: "You take the flame or the Eurochild or the beetle or the figure from 100th Window, what connects them all is that they are a series of powerful emblems." Powerful emblems. Add 100th Window to your rack - [Get it on Amazon](https://amzn.to/4uJMkLt?ref=artbeforenoise.com) --- ## Heligoland (2010) Seven years passed between *100th Window* and *Heligoland*. Seven years. And when the fifth album finally arrived, the cover felt like a reckoning. ![](https://www.artbeforenoise.com/content/images/2026/05/Massive-Attack---Heligoland.jpg) Designed by Del Naja and Tom Hingston Studio, *Heligoland* was released in multiple cover variants; blue, orange, pink, yellow. Each a different coloured field with the band name and album title in clean typography. Simple. Elemental. Almost a return to the spare directness of *Blue Lines* nearly twenty years earlier. The deluxe edition went further, a unique black glitter coated cover that needed to be seen in person to be fully understood. Not a design to be photographed or streamed. A physical object that rewarded the act of holding it. Del Naja's own words on the philosophy that runs through all five covers are the best summary of what Massive Attack's visual identity has always been about: "The promotion and marketing of Massive Attack, right up to Heligoland, has always been about creating a symbol that under normal circumstances would be considered a brand identity but [actually was the opposite](https://www.artbeforenoise.com/brat-charli-xcx-album-cover/)." An anti-brand brand. A visual language that accumulates meaning across five albums and thirty years without ever repeating itself or explaining itself. The flame. The Eurochild. The beetle. The shattered figure. The coloured field. Five covers. One vision. Completely, unmistakably theirs. Why not grab a copy of Heligoland - [It's on Amazon](https://amzn.to/4tr9PYo?ref=artbeforenoise.com) ### It Came From A Rice Cooker URL: https://www.artbeforenoise.com/aladdin-sane-david-bowie-album-cover/ Last updated: 2026-06-30T12:12:35.000Z If I showed you the cover of [*Aladdin Sane*](https://amzn.to/4uLZJ5L?ref=artbeforenoise.com) without telling you the album title, would you know what you were looking at? Almost certainly yes. You would know it was [David Bowie](https://www.artbeforenoise.com/tag/david-bowie/). The lightning bolt across the face. The closed eyes. The porcelain skin. The calm, slightly otherworldly stillness of the whole image. You would know it was Bowie before you read a word. But would you know the album name? Would you know it was *Aladdin Sane* rather than [*Ziggy Stardust*](https://www.artbeforenoise.com/ziggy-stardust-david-bowie-album-cover/) or *Heroes* or any of the other Bowie records? I'm not sure I would. This is a cover so powerful that the image has completely escaped the album it was made for. It doesn't belong to *Aladdin Sane* anymore. It belongs to David Bowie. It belongs to everyone. ![](https://www.artbeforenoise.com/content/images/2026/05/Aladdin-Sane---David-Bowie.jpg) --- ## The Manager's Gambit January 1973\. Bowie has just completed a triumphant American tour. *Ziggy Stardust* is a phenomenon. And his manager Tony Defries has a plan. Defries was determined to make the cover as costly as possible, insisting on an unprecedented seven-colour printing system rather than the usual four, all in an effort to ensure RCA promoted the album extensively. The logic was elegant: the more RCA spent on the cover, the more they would need to recoup through promotion. Defries was essentially forcing the record company's hand. The instructions to photographer Brian Duffy were simple: create a high-impact, superstar-making cover. Defries wanted to persuade RCA that Bowie was sufficiently important to warrant megastar treatment and funding. Duffy was one of the great portrait photographers of his generation, alongside David Bailey and Terence Donovan, he had defined the visual language of swinging London in the 1960s. He was not someone you hired for a straightforward promotional shoot. He was someone you hired when you wanted something that would last. --- ## The Rice Cooker Now for the detail that makes this story genuinely extraordinary. Bowie's initial idea was to have a flash, a literal lightning bolt on his face, inspired by Elvis and referencing his vision of an electric boy cracked by lightning. Pierre La Roche drew a small flash on Bowie's face, but Duffy intervened and drew a large, bold lightning bolt instead. But where did the lightning bolt idea originally come from? The answer depends on who you ask. According to one account, Bowie and La Roche were discussing ideas for the cover when Bowie said: "Thoughts go through my head like lightning bolts. I wish I could turn them off." Suddenly La Roche's eye fell on the Panasonic rice cooker in the studio, which had a lightning bolt on it as a caution symbol. "Shall we just paint that on your face?" That is how the idea was born. A rice cooker. The most recognisable image in David Bowie's entire visual catalogue, the image that appeared on millions of faces on the night he died, came from a rice cooker sitting in a north London studio in January 1973. ![white rice cooker on tabletop](https://images.unsplash.com/photo-1569641092045-f6ec23879aef?crop=entropy&cs=tinysrgb&fit=max&fm=jpg&ixid=M3wxMTc3M3wwfDF8c2VhcmNofDE1fHxyaWNlJTIwY29va2VyfGVufDB8fHx8MTc3ODUwNTU2MHww&ixlib=rb-4.1.0&q=80&w=2000) A rice cooker. Not the one sen by Bowie, but a rice cooker nonetheless - Photo by [J. Brouwer](https://unsplash.com/@brouwjess?ref=artbeforenoise.com) / [Unsplash](https://unsplash.com/?utm%5Fsource=ghost&utm%5Fmedium=referral&utm%5Fcampaign=api-credit) --- ## The Teardrop The lightning bolt gets all the attention. But look more closely at the cover and you'll notice something else, a small teardrop sitting on Bowie's collarbone. It was added in post-production by airbrush artist Philip Castle, who had previously worked with Stanley Kubrick on the posters for A Clockwork Orange and Full Metal Jacket. Bowie thought the teardrop concept was "rather sweet" and liked the idea immediately. The bolt splits the face. The teardrop falls from the wound. --- ## A Lad Insane Here is the detail that might be the best of all. The album almost had a completely different name. According to Chris Duffy, the photographer's son, the name may have emerged from a miscommunication between Bowie and his father. "Duffy asked David what the album was to be called, and David replied, 'A Lad Insane.' Duffy interpreted this as Aladdin Sane," Chris Duffy said. A Lad Insane. Aladdin Sane. One misheard in a studio. And the album, and the character, took its name from that mishearing. The title was also a reference to Bowie's half-brother Terry, who had been diagnosed as a schizophrenic. Bowie feared that he, like his brother, had a split personality. The lightning bolt splitting his face in two would symbolise that division; the sane versus the insane. The bolt is not just decoration. It is a self-portrait of a man divided against himself, rendered in red and blue across his own face. --- ## The Most Expensive Album Cover Ever Sold In November 2025 the original dye transfer print of the Aladdin Sane cover, shot by Duffy, airbrushed by Castle, made up by La Roche, sold at Bonhams in London for £381,400\. Nearly half a million dollars. A new auction record for an album cover, breaking the previous record set by the original artwork for [Led Zeppelin](https://www.artbeforenoise.com/tag/led-zeppelin/)'s debut album. Chris Duffy, the photographer's son, took to calling the image the Mona Lisa of Pop. When Bowie died in January 2016, fans around the world painted lightning bolts on their faces in tribute. The image had long since escaped the album, escaped the music, escaped everything, and become [something universal](https://www.artbeforenoise.com/renaissance-beyonce-album-cover/). A rice cooker. A misheard album title. A teardrop added in post. And one of the most recognisable images in the history of popular culture. That's the cover of *Aladdin Sane*. ### Fifteen Seconds URL: https://www.artbeforenoise.com/nevermind-nirvana-album-cover/ Last updated: 2026-08-30T12:08:46.000Z How does Spencer Elden feel about being the Nevermind baby? The answer, it turns out, is complicated. And it changed dramatically over thirty years. And it ended up in a federal court in California. But we'll get to that. First, the cover itself. Because before it became a legal battleground, it was just a brilliant idea that came from a very unlikely place. ![](https://www.artbeforenoise.com/content/images/2026/05/Nevermind---Nirvana-Album-Cover.jpg) --- ## Kurt Cobain, Water Births and a Fishhook The concept came from Kurt Cobain, who had been watching a television documentary about water births and became fascinated by the image of infants suspended in fluid, floating between one world and the next. Cobain took the idea to [Geffen Records](https://www.artbeforenoise.com/tag/geffen-records/) art director Robert Fisher. Fisher loved it immediately but the stock footage of underwater births he found was too graphic for the record company. The stock photo of a swimming baby they eventually settled on wanted $7,500 a year for its use. Fisher decided to shoot his own. But a baby underwater wasn't quite enough. "We thought; OK, we've got to make it more than just a baby underwater. So Kurt came up with the idea of adding a fishhook to make it [more menacing](https://altrockchick.com/2013/03/25/classic-music-review-nevermind-by-nirvana/?ref=artbeforenoise.com). We spent the afternoon sitting around thinking of all the funny things we could put on the fishhook. One idea was a piece of meat, like a big raw steak. Another was a CD. We went to lunch and we were like, how about a burrito? Oh there's a dog, what about a dog? It just went on for hours. I don't remember who said dollar bill but everyone was like, that's pretty good. And that's what it ended up being." A burrito on a fishhook. History nearly looked very different. --- ## The Shoot Fisher found his photographer in a work catalogue. The tagline read: *specialises in submerged humans.* That was Kirk Weddle, and he was their guy. Fisher hired several parents with newborns to come to the Pasadena Aquatic Center in return for $200\. A doll was initially used for some test shots, then the actual babies were passed underwater by their parents and Weddle snapped away. There were about fifty shots. Only one, according to Fisher, was right: "The positioning, the look on the baby's face, the way that his arms were stretched out like he was reaching for something, everything about it was just perfect." That baby was four month old Spencer Elden. The shoot lasted around fifteen seconds. The dollar bill on the fishhook was added later in post production and was never in the water with him. [Geffen was concerned](https://www.artbeforenoise.com/appetite-for-destruction-guns-n-roses-album-cover/) that the infant's penis, visible in the photo, would cause offence, and prepared an alternate cover without it. They relented when Cobain said the only compromise he would accept would be a sticker covering the penis reading: "If you're offended by this, you must be a closet paedophile." The sticker was never used. --- ## What The Cover Actually Means Cobain added the fishhook and dollar bill to transform a birth image into a commentary on the [corruption of innocence](https://www.artbeforenoise.com/neon-bible-arcade-fire-album-cover/) by American capitalism. A baby; pure, naked, new to the world, swimming instinctively toward money on a hook. Unable to resist. Unable to see the danger. It is, in other words, a commentary on all of us. And it landed at exactly the right cultural moment, 1991\. It was the tail end of the Reagan era, a generation that had been sold the American dream and was starting to wonder if the hook was showing. The cover now features in the Museum of Modern Art's collection and is regarded as a design classic. A fifteen second underwater shoot of a four month old baby produced one of the most significant pieces of graphic design of the twentieth century. --- ## Spencer Elden - The Long and Complicated Story For most of his life, Spencer Elden embraced being the Nevermind baby. He was paid to recreate the photo multiple times in adulthood, sold autographs on posters and memorabilia, referred to himself as the Nirvana baby, tattooed [Nevermind](https://amzn.to/42sa6zn?ref=artbeforenoise.com) on his chest, and sent photographer Kirk Weddle a thank you postcard featuring a hand drawn illustration of the album cover. And then, in August 2021, he sued. Elden's lawsuit named Cobain's estate, former bandmates Dave Grohl and Krist Novoselic, photographer Kirk Weddle, Universal Music, Geffen Records, Warner Records and MCA Music. It sought at least $150,000 in damages from each defendant. Elden claimed that the use of his likeness on the album cover was made without his consent or that of his legal guardians, that it violated federal child pornography statutes, and that it resulted in lifelong damages. Did lawyers get in his ear? Possibly. But his own words from years earlier told a different story. "I got a little upset for a bit," he said in 2016\. "I was trying to reach out to these people. I never met anybody. I didn't get a call or email. I just woke up already being a part of this huge project. It's pretty difficult, you feel like you're famous for nothing, but you didn't really do anything but their album." There is something genuinely sad in that. A man defined for his entire life by fifteen seconds in a [swimming pool](https://www.artbeforenoise.com/album-covers-swimming-pools/) at four months old. Whether the lawsuit was legally justified or not, the feeling behind it is understandable. ![](https://www.artbeforenoise.com/content/images/2026/05/Spencer-Elden.webp) Spencer Elden - via [New York Times](https://www.nytimes.com/2022/09/04/arts/music/nirvana-nevermind-baby-lawsuit.html?ref=artbeforenoise.com) --- ## The Court's Decision The judge was not sympathetic. Judge Fernando Olguin ruled that the Nevermind cover featured "neither the pose, focal point, setting, nor overall context suggesting the album cover features sexually explicit conduct." He also noted that Elden had previously "embraced and financially benefitted from being featured on the album cover." The court entered final judgment dismissing the case with prejudice on September 30, 2025\. Thirty years after the album's release, the baby on the cover lost his case against the band that made him famous. --- ## What It All Means The Nevermind cover is controversial not because of what it shows, a baby swimming in a pool, but because of what it means, what it symbolises, and what it did to the person in it. Spencer Elden didn't choose to be on that cover. His parents signed the release for $200\. He spent thirty years being recognised in the street, being asked to recreate the photo, signing posters of his own infant nudity. And then he sued, lost, and watched the album carry on selling. Meanwhile Kurt Cobain, who came up with the idea watching a documentary about water births and spent an afternoon debating whether to put a burrito on a fishhook, died in 1994 at 27, never knowing what the cover would eventually cost the baby in it. The dollar is still on the hook. Spencer Elden is still swimming toward it. ### That's Not His Suit URL: https://www.artbeforenoise.com/thriller-michael-jackson-album-cover/ Last updated: 2026-08-09T13:14:25.000Z It is July 22, 1982\. A recording studio on Beverly Boulevard in Hollywood. Michael Jackson, already a global superstar, already a musical genius, not yet the most famous person on the planet is three quarters of the way through recording what will become the best selling album in history. Nobody knows that yet. Not the label. Not the producers. Not Michael. What they do know is that they need a cover. ![A full-length photo of Michael Jackson lying down on his side in a white suit with a black button-down shirt, resting his head on his hand and smiling softly against a dark, plain background.](https://www.artbeforenoise.com/content/images/2026/05/Thriller-by-Michael-Jackson.jpg) Thriller by Michael Jackson --- ## The Photographer Dick Zimmerman had been referred to by the media as an artistic genius. Known as The Image Maker, he was considered one of the most accomplished portrait photographers of the twentieth century. In 1982 he was commissioned to shoot the Thriller cover. During the two weeks before the shoot, Zimmerman had various meetings with the creative heads from CBS and Michael's manager Freddie Demand. The purpose was to create a visual direction for the album that everyone agreed on. Art direction on the finished cover went to Tony Lane and Nancy Donald. The vision was simple: clean, elegant, Michael front and centre. Nothing too complicated. They had absolutely no idea what they were creating. --- ## The Suit The day of the shoot arrived. Zimmerman had hired one of the best fashion stylists in LA to gather a large variety of wardrobe. After about an hour of weeding through the clothes, Michael couldn't find anything he was crazy about. Zimmerman started to panic, then noticed Michael looking at the white suit he was wearing. Michael asked if they had anything like it. They didn't. So Zimmerman asked him if he would like to wear his own suit. Considering his choices, this was exactly what Michael wanted. Fortunately for the shoot and the time involved, the suit fit. Read that again. The white suit on the cover of the best selling album in history, the suit that Michael Jackson wore on a cover that over 100 million people now own, belonged to the photographer. It was not planned. It was not styled. It was a last minute decision born out of an hour of rejected wardrobe choices. Jackson later added brown fur to the suit. The final look was relaxed, elegant, and effortlessly cool. It came together in minutes. --- ## The Tiger Now for the detail you actually came here for. They had decided prior to the shoot that Michael would have a tiger cub in the shots, so they had a selection for him to choose from. Jackson had suggested the idea himself. And then things got complicated. According to Zimmerman, Jackson kept the tiger cub away from his face, fearing he would be scratched. Jackson was so focused on playing with the baby tigers that it was hard to get his attention to the camera. There is something wonderful about that image. The most famous entertainer in the world, in a suit borrowed from his photographer, so distracted by a tiger cub that the photographer couldn't get him to look at the camera. The cover of Thriller very nearly featured Michael Jackson staring at a baby tiger instead of the lens. The gatefold sleeve reveals the tiger cub at Jackson's leg. The front cover crops it out entirely. Another picture from the shoot, with Jackson embracing the cub, was used for the 2001 special edition of Thriller. Jackson later had tigers of his own at Neverland Ranch. One of them was named Thriller. ![Michael Jackson - Thriller 2001 Special Edition Cover featuring the tiger cub on the front](https://www.artbeforenoise.com/content/images/2026/05/Michael-Jackson---Thriller-2001-Special-Edition-Cover.webp) Michael Jackson - Thriller 2001 Special Edition Cover --- ## The Camera That Made History Here is the detail that most people don't know. In November 2023, Zimmerman auctioned off a group of original one of a kind Polaroid test pictures from the Thriller shoot, along with the Hasselblad camera that took the photos. The test cover shot offered in the auction marks the first ever image captured of Michael Jackson wearing the now iconic white suit, taken only seconds before the photo ultimately chosen for the cover. "The cultural importance of this collection of images, as well as the camera, truly cannot be overstated," said Edwin Bailey of Blackwell Auctions. "The Thriller cover is one of the most widely distributed and immediately recognizable photographs ever taken." One hundred million copies. A borrowed suit. A distracted tiger. A Hasselblad camera. And a photographer who happened to be wearing the right suit on the right day. --- ## What The Cover Actually Says The [Thriller](https://amzn.to/4ekNXu2?ref=artbeforenoise.com) cover is, on the surface, one of the simpler covers we've looked at on Art Before Noise. No [pulsar data](https://www.artbeforenoise.com/unknown-pleasures-joy-division-album-cover/). No [working zip](https://www.artbeforenoise.com/sticky-fingers-rolling-stones-album-cover/). No [screaming woman emerging from the earth](https://www.artbeforenoise.com/maggot-brain-funkadelic-album-cover/). Just a man in a white suit, reclining, looking directly at you. And yet it works completely. Because Michael Jackson at the peak of his powers needed nothing else. The confidence in that pose; relaxed, assured, entirely at ease, tells you everything about what you're about to hear before you've dropped the needle. The suit was borrowed. The tiger kept wandering off. The whole thing came together in a few hours on a July afternoon in Hollywood. And over 100 million people bought it. ### Fifty Pounds URL: https://www.artbeforenoise.com/revolver-beatles-album-cover/ Last updated: 2026-07-03T06:40:32.000Z My step-dad had [the Beatles](https://www.artbeforenoise.com/tag/the-beatles/) box set. You know the one I am talking about. The blue one. And when I was a kid I would flick through it - all those sleeves, all those covers, each one its own little world. Most of them I recognised. Some of them I didn't fully understand yet. But Revolver always stopped me. Not because it was black and white. Not because it was dramatic. But because it was different in a way I couldn't quite articulate as a kid. Hand drawn faces tangled up in hair. Small photographs tucked into the gaps. Four men and yet somehow more than four men; controlled chaos that felt like it was hiding things if you looked long enough. I was right. It was. ![](https://www.artbeforenoise.com/content/images/2026/05/The-Beatles---Revolver-album-cover.jpg) --- ## Hamburg, 1960 Before we can talk about the cover of Revolver, we need to go back to Hamburg in the early 1960s. Because the story of this cover begins not in a studio or a design office, but in a small club in the Reeperbahn district where a young German art student named Klaus Voormann first heard a band called The Beatles. Voormann was no stranger to the Beatles. A bassist and visual artist himself, he met and befriended the band during the early 1960s when the quartet was playing residencies in Hamburg. They became close friends. When Voormann moved to England a few years later, he lived with George Harrison and Ringo Starr in the band's London flat after Paul McCartney and John Lennon had moved out. In late June 1966, John Lennon called and asked if he had any ideas for the next album cover. Voormann wasn't a hired gun to complete the project. [He was family](https://www.artbeforenoise.com/horses-patti-smith-album-cover/). "John called me and said, 'It's John,' and at first I was thinking, 'John who?' I didn't know who it was. Well, it's John Lennon, and he said, 'Do you have an idea for our next album cover? We don't know what we want on there, so if you have any ideas, let's see it.' Then he invited me to come down to the studio and I listened to the tracks for what would become the Revolver album." What Voormann heard in that studio changed everything. --- ## Tomorrow Never Knows When he first listened to the rough tracks for Revolver, Voormann was struck by one thought: "This is gonna be a tough job to do a cover!" "They were just rough, not finished, but it was amazing, just amazing. So many great songs. And then came 'Tomorrow Never Knows,' which was so amazing because I didn't expect it. I was sitting there listening to the tracks, and you suddenly heard those birds fluttering and sped-up tapes, backward cymbals, the guitar solo, all this rumble was going on. Immediately I was captured by it and thought it was wonderful. But when it was finished I thought, 'Oh my God, what are the fans gonna say?'" The mission for the cover, as Voormann saw it, was to send up a flare to alert listeners that Revolver was something fundamentally different from anything The Beatles had done before. Not just a new album. A new direction. A new band, almost. He went home to his tiny attic apartment in London and got to work. Probably my favourite Beatles song. --- ## Three Weeks, Pen and Ink, and Fifty Pounds Voormann worked for three weeks in his tiny attic apartment. He used pen and black ink to create four large line drawings of the Beatles. He then combined the drawings with a collage of black and white photos. In his line drawings of the four Beatles, Voormann drew inspiration from the work of the nineteenth century illustrator Aubrey Beardsley, who was the subject of a long running exhibition at London's Victoria and Albert Museum in 1966 and highly influential on fashion and design themes of the time. Unifying all the images on the Revolver cover is the Beatles' hair; a swirl that gives the sleeve a psychedelic feel, even in black and white. "Hair's very important," Voormann says, "and it's very difficult for people these days to imagine how important and how sensational those haircuts were. We called The Beatles hair 'mushroomhead' in Germany. So I thought, 'That's a good idea, something with hair.' Then I came to the conclusion of using lots of hair." The result: four faces emerging from a tangle of hair, small photographs tucked into the gaps, hand drawn and collaged and carefully composed and it was unlike anything that had appeared on an album cover before. And it almost gave Brian Epstein a heart attack. In the best possible way. Voormann confirms the shared story that Beatles manager Brian Epstein wept with joy when the artist presented it to him. "That was true, yes. I don't invent things," he says with a laugh. "\[Epstein\] really said that he was worried that the public would not accept the music, the same thought I had. He said, 'This cover is the bridge.'" The bridge. Between the Beatles the world knew and the Beatles that Revolver was about to introduce. Epstein understood immediately what Voormann had done. For all of this, three weeks of work, one of the most celebrated album covers in history, Voormann said the Beatles' record company paid him only about 50 pounds, roughly $140 US, in 1966\. "I would have done it for nothing and I didn't feel I was in a position to make it hard for them, by saying, 'You have to pay me this or that much,'" he said. "They said 50 pounds is the absolute limit for a record sleeve." Fifty pounds. For a Grammy winning album cover. For one of the most recognised pieces of graphic design of the twentieth century. ![Is Paul McCartney screaming on the cover of Revolver?](https://www.artbeforenoise.com/content/images/2026/05/Is-Paul-McCartney-screaming-on-the-cover-of-Revolver.png) Is Paul McCartney screaming on the cover of Revolver? --- ## The Easter Egg Voormann placed the various photos within the tangle of hair that connects the four faces. The drawings show each Beatle "in another state of consciousness", such that the older images appear to be tumbling out from them. [Look closely](https://www.artbeforenoise.com/album-covers-hidden-details/) at the hair, particularly around John Lennon's face. Tucked into the swirling strands are tiny photographs of the band from earlier in their career. Older versions of themselves, younger, more innocent, pre-psychedelia, pre-Revolver, literally tangled up in the hair of their present selves. And then there is the detail that most people miss entirely. Voormann hid himself in the cover, just underneath the drawing of John's mouth. The man who made the cover concealed himself inside it. Quietly. Right there on one of the most famous sleeves in history. If you know where to look, Klaus Voormann is on the cover of Revolver. ![](https://www.artbeforenoise.com/content/images/2026/05/Voormann-on-the-ocver-of-Revolver-by-The-Beatles.png) There he is, that cheeky monkey --- ## The Grammy and The Lost Original In March 1967, the Revolver cover won the Grammy Award for Best Album Cover. It was the first Grammy awarded to a graphically designed record cover for a rock and pop album. Voormann, by his own admission, never expected it. And then something extraordinary happened. Or rather, something extraordinary didn't happen. To this day, Voormann still does not know what happened to the original artwork. Supposedly, it disappeared without a trace. The original pen and ink drawings, three weeks of work in a tiny attic apartment, the Grammy winning original artwork for one of the most celebrated album covers in history simply vanished. Somewhere out there, possibly, is the original artwork for the Revolver cover. Hanging on someone's wall. In a storage unit. Under a bed. Worth a considerable fortune and completely unaccounted for. --- ## What The Cover Actually Says Here is what I think about the Revolver cover now, as an adult who has spent time properly looking at it for the first time. It is a cover that rewards attention. The more you look, the more you find. The photographs tumbling out of the hair. Voormann hidden beneath John's mouth. The psychedelic tangle that somehow holds it all together. It is a cover that respects the intelligence of the person looking at it. It assumes you will lean in rather than glance and move on. Voormann himself said: "I'm very happy with it. There's nothing I would do differently. I think it captured what I wanted to capture. I think it's perfect." He's right. It is perfect. My step-dad had the Beatles box. The blue one. And a kid flicking through those sleeves stopped at Revolver every single time without knowing why. Now I know. ### The Phoenix, The Harpy, The Pixels URL: https://www.artbeforenoise.com/mbdtf-kanye-west-album-cover/ Last updated: 2026-08-23T11:01:25.000Z In 2010 I was listening to a lot of rap. [*My Beautiful Dark Twisted Fantasy*](https://amzn.to/4tdrsLk?ref=artbeforenoise.com) was in the rotation. I knew the songs. I knew the album. But if you'd asked me then what was actually happening on that cover; who made it, [why it looked the way it did](https://www.artbeforenoise.com/album-covers-hidden-details/), why some versions of it were pixelated beyond recognition, I couldn't have told you. I just thought it was [Kanye being Kanye](https://www.artbeforenoise.com/yeezus-kanye-west-album-cover/). Which is both entirely correct and completely insufficient as an explanation. ![](https://www.artbeforenoise.com/content/images/2026/05/My-Beautiful-Dark-Twisted-Fantasy-by-Kanye-West.jpg) Album Anatomy | **Album** | *My Beautiful Dark Twisted Fantasy* | | ---------------- | ------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------ | | **Artist** | [Kanye West](https://www.artbeforenoise.com/tag/kanye-west/) | | **Released** | 22 November 2010 | | **Label** | [Roc-A-Fella Records](https://www.artbeforenoise.com/tag/roc-a-fella-records/) / [Def Jam Records](https://www.artbeforenoise.com/tag/def-jam-records/) | | **On the cover** | A painting of West being straddled on a couch by an armless, winged, tailed female figure; part sphinx, part phoenix, part harpy. Both figures nude, West holding a beer | | **Design** | Painting by [George Condo](https://www.artbeforenoise.com/tag/george-condo/) | | **Decade** | [2010s](https://www.artbeforenoise.com/tag/2010s/) | --- ## Hawaii, Exile and a Backhanded Apology Before we talk about the cover, we need to briefly talk about where this album came from. Because the context matters. Retreating to a self-imposed exile in Hawaii after a period of controversy in 2009 following his interruption of Taylor Swift at the MTV Video Music Awards, West recorded at Honolulu's Avex Recording Studio in a communal environment with numerous musicians. West said that My Beautiful Dark Twisted Fantasy served as a backhanded apology after his VMAs outburst, detailing that he used the music to become accepted again. In his own words to The New York Times in 2013: *"Dark Fantasy was my long, backhanded apology. You know how people give a backhanded compliment? It was a backhanded apology. It was like, all these raps, all these sonic acrobatics. I was like: 'Let me show you guys what I can do, and please accept me back.'"* An artist in exile, making the album of his life, as a form of apology. That energy runs through every element of *MBDTF*, including the cover. --- ## Enter George Condo For the album artwork, West turned to [George Condo](https://www.instagram.com/artistgeorgecondo/?ref=artbeforenoise.com); an American contemporary artist whose work sits at the intersection of Abstract Expressionism, Cubism and what he himself calls *psychological Cubism*. Condo had shown at major galleries worldwide and was represented by some of the most prestigious dealers in the art world. He was not, in other words, a commercial illustrator hired to do a job. He was a serious fine artist brought in to make something serious. West came to Condo's studio between eight and ten times over the course of the summer. The artwork was done at Condo's studio, after West visited for several hours and they listened to tapes of his music. Over the next few days, the painter designed eight or nine paintings for the album. Not one. Eight or nine. A body of work built around a single album. That level of artistic investment was incredible and it showed in the results. --- ## The Cover Itself The album's artwork shows West being straddled on a couch by an armless winged female, who has fearsome features and a long, spotted tail. Both are nude, with West shown holding a beer. Condo's own description of what he painted is one of the great pieces of art criticism ever written about a piece of art criticism: "She's a kind of fragment, between a sphinx, a phoenix, a haunting ghost, a harpy. And then Kanye is also in some sort of strange 1970s burned-out back room of a Chicago blues club having a beer, so far away from the real Kanye West that it's just a scream." In painting Kanye in such an outrageous situation, Condo says: "I was challenging him with the imagery as well. He said, 'I'm shocked, but I like it, and I gotta go with my gut feeling.'" Shocked but going with his gut. That is, in four words, the creative philosophy of *My Beautiful Dark Twisted Fantasy* in its entirety. ![My Beautiful Dark Twisted Fantasy - The Uncensored Cover](https://www.artbeforenoise.com/content/images/2026/05/My-Beautiful-Dark-Twisted-Fantasy---The-Uncensored-Cover.png) My Beautiful Dark Twisted Fantasy - The Uncensored Cover --- ## The Ballerina Before we get to the ban, there is another cover worth knowing about. Because the main cover, the phoenix, the harpy, the beer, was not the only option on the table. The ballerina concept came from one of those studio visits. "We were hanging around one night, and we were listening to that tune 'Runaway,'" Condo recalls, when his wife Anna showed West a shot of French dancer Sylvie Guillem moving in slow motion. "And somehow Kanye grabbed onto that idea of the ballerina," Condo explains. "He just said, 'Hey man, I'd like to have a great ballerina painting.' I thought of a ballerina toasting. You know, 'let's toast to the scumbags.'" The ballerina painting became one of the alternate covers. It also worked its way into the *Runaway* short film and West's performance at the VMAs. An image born from a slow motion clip of a French dancer watched late at night in a New York studio ended up defining the entire visual language of the album's promotional campaign. ![My Beautiful Dark Twisted Fantasy - The Ballerina Cover by Kanye West](https://www.artbeforenoise.com/content/images/2026/05/My-Beautiful-Dark-Twisted-Fantasy---The-Ballerina-Cover-by-Kanye-West.jpg) The other **other* cover for My Beautiful Dark Twisted Fantasy - The Ballerina --- ## The Ban According to Condo, West requested the original cover image to be [provocative enough to be banned](https://www.artbeforenoise.com/lovesexy-prince-album-cover/) by retailers, as a publicity stunt. Again, Kanye being Kanye. Yep, he commissioned a cover specifically designed to get banned. And then when it got banned, he took to Twitter: "Yoooo they banned my album cover!!!!! Banned in the USA!!! They don't want me chilling on the couch with my Phoenix!" West also cited the case of [Nirvana's 1991 album Nevermind](https://www.artbeforenoise.com/nevermind-nirvana-album-cover/), which featured a photo of a naked baby, questioning why the band are allowed to have someone [nude on their cover](https://www.artbeforenoise.com/beatles-butcher-cover-yesterday-and-today/), but he "can't have a PAINTING of a monster with no arms and a polka dot tail and wings". The Nirvana comparison is an interesting one. A painted mythological creature is arguably less confronting than a photograph of a real naked infant. The ban was, as Condo himself suggested, more about perception than genuine offence. Condo's response to the ban was characteristically blunt: "The superimposition of people's perceptions on a cartoon is shocking. What's happening in their minds should be banned." --- ## The Pixels The response to the album was clear: it was banned from the shelves of Walmart and comically pixelated on iTunes to protect us from the cover's erotic allure. The pixelation was applied to streaming and digital versions of the album, blurring the central figures into abstraction while leaving the painting's fiery red background and overall composition intact. The result is something that looks like a glitch. A deliberate corruption. An image that has been censored so aggressively it becomes more interesting than the original. Which is exactly what Kanye wanted. A cover that gets banned generates more attention than a cover that doesn't. A [pixelated image](https://www.artbeforenoise.com/eight-covers-one-secret-pattern/) makes you want to see the unpixelated version immediately. The censorship became part of the art before the noise. --- ## What The Cover Actually Says Here is what I think about the MBDTF cover now, as someone who was listening to this album in 2010 without knowing any of this. It is a cover made by a serious fine artist working with a serious musical artist at the peak of his powers, designed to say something uncomfortable about fame, mythology, power and the price of public life. The harpy straddling Kanye on a couch is not just a provocative image. It is a visual metaphor for what fame does to a person; consuming, overwhelming, and impossible to escape. The cover was [banned](https://www.artbeforenoise.com/tag/controversial/). Pixelated. Debated. And the album underneath it was called the best of the decade by multiple publications. Several publications, including Pitchfork and Rolling Stone, have ranked it as the best album of the 2010s and among the greatest of all time. I thought it was just Kanye being Kanye. It was. But Kanye being Kanye producing one of the most ambitious and deliberate album covers of the 21st century. ### The Stuff Of Diners And Motels URL: https://www.artbeforenoise.com/neon-bible-arcade-fire-album-cover/ Last updated: 2026-08-23T10:58:21.000Z The cover of [*Neon Bible*](https://amzn.to/439RSD8?ref=artbeforenoise.com) by Arcade Fire is not the most immediately arresting image I've written about on this blog. A neon sign in the shape of an open Bible, photographed against a black background. A rough wooden frame around the edges. Some pink and orange light catching the darkness. It looks, at first glance, like something you'd walk past in a record shop without stopping. Look again. Because there is considerably more going on here than first appears. ![Album cover for Neon Bile by Arcade Fire](https://www.artbeforenoise.com/content/images/2026/05/Neon-Bible---Arcade-Fire-Album-Cover.jpg) Album Anatomy | **Album** | *Neon Bible* | | ---------------- | --------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------- | | **Artist** | [Arcade Fire](https://www.artbeforenoise.com/tag/arcade-fire/) | | **Released** | 5 March 2007 | | **Label** | [Merge Records](https://www.artbeforenoise.com/tag/merge-records/) / [Rough Trade Records](https://www.artbeforenoise.com/tag/rough-trade-records/) | | **On the cover** | A six-foot neon sign in the shape of an open Bible, caught mid-flicker against a black background, framed in rough wood | | **Design** | Art direction by Tracy Maurice | | **Decade** | [2000s](https://www.artbeforenoise.com/tag/2000s/) | --- ## A Sixteen Year Old's Novel Before we talk about the cover we need to talk about the name. Because the title *Neon Bible* did not originate with Arcade Fire. When [John Kennedy Toole](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/John%5FKennedy%5FToole?ref=artbeforenoise.com) wrote his first novel [The Neon Bible](https://amzn.to/3RWBOSN?ref=artbeforenoise.com) in 1954 at the age of sixteen, the notion of a glowing scripture was particularly provocative. There was the juxtaposition of ancient text and modern design, but something else too. Neon was the stuff of diners and motels, not churches. With three little words, Toole brought into focus an image of religion as vapid, crass commercialism. Toole would go on to write A Confederacy of Dunces, one of the great American comic novels, published posthumously after his suicide in 1969\. The Neon Bible was his teenage work, dark and Southern Gothic and soaked in the particular anxiety of growing up religious in the American South. Arcade Fire's Win Butler read Toole's novel, though in an interview he dismissed the replication of the book's title for the band's second album as "kind of a coincidence." He immediately clarified: "I just jotted it down in my notebook and kept coming back to it. The song was very much off-the-cuff, written in one night and recorded the next day. Lyrically, there's a lot of stuff dealing with religion and culture, which I'm really interested in." Kind of a coincidence. The kind of coincidence that connects a teenage Southern Gothic novel from 1954 to a Canadian indie rock band's second album in 2007\. Sometimes the right title just finds you. --- ## The Church They Bought The majority of Neon Bible was recorded at a church the band bought and renovated in Farnham, Quebec. Not rented. Bought. Arcade Fire purchased a church, [converted it into a recording studio](https://www.artbeforenoise.com/nine-inch-nails-downward-spiral-album-cover/) and made their second album inside it. The decision to record in a church was not incidental. The album is deeply concerned with [organised religion](https://www.artbeforenoise.com/maggot-brain-funkadelic-album-cover/); its power, its corruption, its hold on the American psyche. Arcade Fire on Neon Bible were angry, embittered and paranoid, targeting the government, the church, the military, the entertainment industry and even the basest instincts of the common man. Recording those songs inside the walls of an actual church, with its acoustics, its history, its physical presence, was a creative decision that shaped every song on the album. The church didn't just provide a space. It provided a feeling. ![the church that arcade fire purchased](https://www.artbeforenoise.com/content/images/2026/05/The-church-Arcade-Fire-owned.webp) source: [https://globalnews.ca/news/1617928/former-arcade-fire-church-gets-new-life/](https://globalnews.ca/news/1617928/former-arcade-fire-church-gets-new-life/?ref=artbeforenoise.com) --- ## The Sign Sorry. I got a little side-tracked there. Now, the cover. The six foot neon sign was commissioned specifically for use on the tour. Not for the album. For the tour. The cover image came from a prop; a physical object built to be seen in concert halls and arenas, repurposed as the album's visual identity. The cover catches the sign mid-flicker, creating the illusion of movement. The cool light blue and intense pink and orange create a striking contrast against the black background. There are multiple Bibles visible that appear to continue up and down beyond the frame, strengthening the concept of endlessly flashing Bibles. Mid-flicker. That detail matters more than it seems. A neon sign that is fully lit is just a sign. A neon sign caught in the moment between on and off, between presence and absence, between illumination and darkness, is something more interesting. Something that suggests instability. Something that asks whether the light is coming on or going out. The framing element, rough wood around the edges, is reminiscent of the ornate frames used in religious imagery. Perhaps the rough appearance of the frame is a reminder that humans were its creator, much like they are of the themes of the album: war, religion, corruption. The neon Bible's modern appearance contrasts with the frame that contains it. The play between the ancient icon of the Bible and the tackiness of neon signs is the point. Ancient and tacky. Sacred and commercial. The Bible as a neon sign, the most honest visual metaphor for the American religious experience that anyone had put on an album cover in years. --- ## What The Cover Actually Says Here is what the Neon Bible cover is actually saying, and why it is considerably more interesting than it first appears. Neon was the stuff of diners and motels, not churches. When you put the Bible in neon, when you give the most sacred text in Western culture the visual language of a roadside diner or a Las Vegas casino, you are saying something very specific about what organised religion has become. Not a spiritual practice. A brand. A neon sign on the highway, flashing on and off, asking you to come inside. Before Neon Bible, Arcade Fire's visual identity had a strong human element; hand-rendered illustrations, vintage photograph texture, hand lettering. This cover highlights the very mechanical nature of a neon sign. The warmth of their debut *Funeral* replaced by something colder, more commercial, more unsettling. Arcade Fire explored Americana themes, including Bible Belt religion, on Neon Bible, the follow up to their breakthrough debut. The corresponding cover captures that perfectly. It doesn't look like much. A sign in the dark. Pink and orange and blue against black. Something you'd walk past in a record shop without stopping. But it's telling you exactly what's inside. And exactly what Arcade Fire thought about the world in 2007. Sometimes a neon sign is just a neon sign. And sometimes it's a comment on the state of Western civilisation. This one is both. ### None More Fictional URL: https://www.artbeforenoise.com/fictional-album-covers-film-tv/ Last updated: 2026-07-16T10:33:40.000Z Some album covers are iconic. Some are controversial. Some [hide secrets you never noticed](https://www.artbeforenoise.com/album-covers-hidden-details/). And some never existed at all; dreamed up by prop departments, art directors and screenwriters to sell the illusion of a band that never played a single note outside of a fictional universe. These are the ten that I think are the best fictional album covers from the movies and TV. Some of them are better than the real thing. --- ## **Smell the Glove - Spinal Tap** *This Is Spinal Tap (1984)* ![Spinal Tap - Smell The Glove promo in magazine](https://www.artbeforenoise.com/content/images/2026/05/Smell-The-Glove-Promo-1.jpg) Spinal Tap - Smell The Glove For me, this is the one that kick-started this post. I always remember that glove. That scene. And, of course, the movie. That hilarious 'rockumentary, if you will'. The original Smell the Glove artwork featured a greased, naked woman on all fours being pushed down by a hand in a glove was deemed too sexist to release by the fictional label in the film. The replacement? [Completely black](https://www.artbeforenoise.com/album-covers-no-text/#6-metallicathe-black-album-1991). Nothing but black. Not even the band name. As David St. Hubbins memorably argued in defence of the all-black cover: *"It's like, how much more black could this be? And the answer is none. None more black."* The cover became so iconic that real bands started copying it. A fictional album cover that influenced real ones. You cannot ask for more than that. You can actually add this one to your collection - [*Smell The Glove - Spinal Tap*](https://amzn.to/4nfyCgQ?ref=artbeforenoise.com) --- ## **The Ultimate Collection - Wyld Stallyns** *Bill & Ted Face the Music (2020)* ![Wyld Stallyns featuring Keanu Reeves](https://www.artbeforenoise.com/content/images/2026/05/Wyld-Stallyns.jpg) Two air-guitar legends from San Dimas, California. The Wyld Stallyns album covers that appear in *Face the Music* are a loving parody of every era of rock; from 80s hair metal excess to 90s grunge minimalism. The art direction is spot on. The band name in [jagged lightning bolt](https://www.artbeforenoise.com/aladdin-sane-david-bowie-album-cover/) font. The completely unnecessary smoke machine aesthetic. Every detail earns its place. Be excellent to each other, indeed. --- ## **The Awesome Album - Mouse Rat** *Parks and Recreation* ![mouse rat from the tv show parks and recreation actually released an album](https://www.artbeforenoise.com/content/images/2026/05/The-Awesome-Album---Mouse-Rat.jpg) The Awesome Album - Mouse Rat Andy Dwyer's revolving door of a band (which went through names including Flames for Flames, Rat Mouse, just Rat, and Land Lorde before settling on Mouse Rat) released [*The Awesome Album*](https://amzn.to/4uiXhTY?ref=artbeforenoise.com) as an actual real album in 2021\. A fictional band from a fictional parks department in a fictional Indiana town made a real album with a real cover. The cover itself is peak D-tier local indie band; hand drawn font, slightly too much going on, absolute confidence in its own mediocrity. It is perfect. --- ## **Stillwater** *Almost Famous (2000)* ![](https://www.artbeforenoise.com/content/images/2026/05/Stillwater-Album-Cover-from-Almost-Famous.jpg) ![](https://www.artbeforenoise.com/content/images/2026/05/Stillwater-Almost-Famous-Album-Cover.jpg) Cameron Crowe didn't just invent a fictional band for *Almost Famous,* he built an entire fictional discography for them, complete with multiple album covers, liner notes and recording credits. The *Faraway* cover is the centrepiece. A moody, sun-drenched 70s rock aesthetic that looks like it could sit between [*Rumours*](https://www.artbeforenoise.com/rumours-fleetwood-mac-album-cover/) and *Hotel California* on any serious record shelf. Crowe was so committed to the illusion that he hired real designers and real photographers to create it. The result is one of the most convincing fictional album covers ever made. --- ## **That Thing You Do! - The Wonders** *That Thing You Do! (1996)* Written and directed by Tom Hanks, *That Thing You Do!* is a love letter to the early 60s pop factory era, and the album cover for The Wonders is a perfect recreation of that world. Four clean cut young men in matching suits, names listed in friendly sans-serif font, everything exactly as it should be. The cover looks so authentic that people have genuinely tried to buy the album without realising the band doesn't exist. That is the highest possible compliment. --- ## **Self Titled - Sex Bob-Omb** *Scott Pilgrim vs. The World (2010)* Gritty. Lo-fi. Xeroxed within an inch of its life. The Sex Bob-Omb self-titled cover looks like it was designed at 2am on a photocopier that was running out of toner. Which is to say it looks exactly like every real self-released punk demo ever made. The attention to detail in [*Scott Pilgrim*](https://amzn.to/4cPRJuc?ref=artbeforenoise.com) is extraordinary throughout and the album cover is no exception. A genuine piece of fictional punk ephemera that any real band would be proud of. --- ## **Get Him to the Greek - Infant Sorrow** *Get Him to the Greek (2010) / Forgetting Sarah Marshall (2008)* Russell Brand's fictional rock god Aldous Snow fronted Infant Sorrow across two films, and the album cover for ![Russell Brand has been a bit naughty](https://www.artbeforenoise.com/content/images/2026/05/image-1.png) *Get Him to the Greek* captures everything a real late-era rock excess album cover should be. Overproduced. Self-important. Absolutely convinced of its own importance. The fictional backstory; Infant Sorrow as one of the last truly great rock bands of a generation is played completely straight, which makes the cover land all the harder. The album was eventually released on actual vinyl, complete with a full colour double-sided insert featuring stills from the film and artwork from the Infant Sorrow discography. --- ## **Renegade - Löded Diper** *Diary of a Wimpy Kid* ![loded diper is a fictional band with a fictional album](https://www.artbeforenoise.com/content/images/2026/05/image.png) The greatest middle school metal album cover ever committed to paper. Löded Diper, spelled exactly that way, intentionally. Löded Diper is Rodrick Heffley's band, and *Renegade* is their magnum opus. The cover art captures everything about being fifteen, convinced you're the next [Metallica](https://www.artbeforenoise.com/tag/metallica/), and having absolutely no graphic design skills whatsoever. The font choices alone deserve an award. Every person who ever had a friend in a terrible teenage band will recognise exactly what they're looking at. --- ## Airheads - The Lone Rangers *Airheads (1994)* Three guys who take a radio station hostage to get their demo tape played. The Lone Rangers, Brendan Fraser, Steve Buscemi and Adam Sandler are the ultimate "we live in a van and eat gas station food" 90s rock band, and their album cover looks exactly like it. Rough around the edges, slightly too aggressive for what the music probably sounds like, designed by someone who owned exactly one font. A perfect time capsule of early 90s rock desperation. --- ## **N/A - Sonic Death Monkey** *High Fidelity (2000)* Sonic Death Monkey is the band that never quite gets named the same thing twice: Barry, Dick and a rotating cast of musicians cycling through names in the back room of Championship Vinyl. There is no proper album cover because there is no proper album. Just the idea of one. And yet somehow that feels right for a film that is fundamentally about the gap between the music we love and the lives we actually live. *High Fidelity* is a film that Art Before Noise readers will understand on a cellular level. And Sonic Death Monkey or whatever they're called this week is its beating heart. --- Knowing these album covers and finding images to match them is pretty hard. Use your imagination to visualise them. Or, watch the movie. *Know a fictional album cover we missed? Let us know in the comments.* ### Unzip This URL: https://www.artbeforenoise.com/sticky-fingers-rolling-stones-album-cover/ Last updated: 2026-08-23T10:55:21.000Z Is that Mick Jagger? The answer is; nobody knows for certain. And Andy Warhol made sure of that deliberately. Warhol's inner circle from the time revealed that Jagger was [never photographed for the LP](https://www.artbeforenoise.com/horses-patti-smith-album-cover/). In fact, it is claimed by numerous contemporaries that Warhol shot a variety of models and never revealed who made the final cut. There exist the usual suspects but no definitive answer has ever been found. In the lineup are Jed Johnson, Warhol's lover at the time, who even denied it was him, and his twin brother Jay. Others from the scene name Factory makeup artist and designer Corey Tippin as the likeliest candidate. He is also convinced it's him. Others include Warhol superstars Joe Dallesandro and Jackie Curtis. Warhol took the secret to his grave. Which, knowing Warhol, was the point. ![The Rolling Stones - Sticky Fingers featured a cover with a zip that you could actually open](https://www.artbeforenoise.com/content/images/2026/05/The-Rolling-Stones---Sticky-Fingers-Cover.jpg) The Rolling Stones - Sticky Fingers ### Album Anatomy | **Album** | *Sticky Fingers* | | ---------------- | ---------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------- | | **Artist** | [The Rolling Stones **Released**23 April 1971 **Label**](https://www.artbeforenoise.com/tag/the-rolling-stones/)[Rolling Stones Records](https://www.artbeforenoise.com/tag/rolling-stones-records/) | | **On the cover** | A close-up of a man's crotch in tight jeans, with a real, working zipper that unzips to reveal cotton briefs beneath — the model's identity never confirmed | | **Design** | Concept by [Andy Warhol](https://www.artbeforenoise.com/tag/andy-warhol/); design by Craig Braun | | **Decade** | [1970s](https://www.artbeforenoise.com/tag/1970s/) | --- ## A Party, A Zip, and A Big Idea The story of the [*Sticky Fingers*](https://amzn.to/4w7CmF8?ref=artbeforenoise.com) cover begins at a party in 1970\. [Warhol](https://www.artbeforenoise.com/album-covers-hidden-details/#3-the-velvet-undergroundwhite-lightwhite-heat-1968) met Stones singer Mick Jagger and suggested the idea of a real zipper on an album cover. The idea appealed to Jagger immediately. By 1971 the Rolling Stones were finally free of their long and fractious relationship with Decca Records and had set up their own label; Rolling Stones Records. *Sticky Fingers* would be the first album released on it. Being on their own label meant they could pretty much do whatever they wished. And what they wished was to put a working zip on the front of their album over a close up photograph of a man's crotch in tight jeans. The Rolling Stones paid Warhol £15,000 for the cover, a considerable amount of money in 1971\. Warhol sent designer Craig Braun Polaroid photographs of the model and Braun got to work turning the concept into reality. It was, as Braun later recalled, considerably harder than it sounds. --- ## The Zip That Destroyed Records The working zip on the *Sticky Fingers* cover was not just a provocative design choice. It was an engineering nightmare. Why? Well, the zipper damaged the grooves of the vinyl. Not really beneficial if you're a record fan. Braun decided that an extra cardboard sleeve should be added. This became an image of writer Glenn O'Brien's underpants, who also used to frequent the Factory. But the problems didn't stop there. It turned out that the record covers were dented by the zipper during distribution. Braun's solution? The zipper had to be pulled down enabling the tab of the zipper to fall into the centre hole of the vinyl. So the working zip on your copy of *Sticky Fingers* (if you have an original pressing) needed to be partially unzipped before the record could be safely stored. A cover that required active participation before you could even put it on the shelf. Warhol would have loved that. And that's before you get into the sheer number of different zips that ended up on this cover. UK pressings alone came with at least three different pull tags; the standard small pull, a rarer larger one stamped "PAN," and a third with a "STAR" tag, you can see them all at the [Serial Records](https://www.serial-records.de/category/?title=Zipper-%28Sticky-Fingers%29&ref=artbeforenoise.com) website. Once you look past the UK and US editions, it gets stranger still. New Zealand got a genuine gatefold version with a printed (not working) zipper laminated onto the cover. Taiwan released the album under the title *Brown Sugar*, complete with a zipper that was simply hand-drawn onto the sleeve rather than photographed. Even the audiophile Mobile Fidelity Sound Lab reissue got in on it, swapping the metal zip for a purely decorative gold one moulded into the cover in relief. ![](https://www.artbeforenoise.com/content/images/2026/07/pan-zipper-from-the-rolling-stones-sticky-fingers-album.jpg) ![](https://www.artbeforenoise.com/content/images/2026/07/zipp-zipper-from-the-rolling-stones-sticky-fingers-album.jpg) The different zippers - source: [https://www.serial-records.de/category/?title=Zipper-%28Sticky-Fingers%29](https://www.serial-records.de/category/?title=Zipper-%28Sticky-Fingers%29&ref=artbeforenoise.com) The album was eventually released as a limited edition with the real zipper and later replaced by a faded photo of the jeans without a real zipper (boring!). --- ## General Franco vs The Rolling Stones Here is where the story gets interesting. The jean cover was pressed everywhere from Venezuela to West Germany. Everywhere, in fact, apart from Spain. Spain was still under the reign of fascist dictator Francisco Franco, all cultural imports into Francoist Spain were [subject to censorship](https://www.artbeforenoise.com/beatles-butcher-cover-yesterday-and-today/). Franco could veto the crotch-centric cover of Sticky Fingers. The replacement cover was something that needs to be seen to be believed. The new sleeve featured a bizarre image of a lady's dismembered hands emerging from a can of treacle-covered fingers, designed by [John Pasche](https://www.artbeforenoise.com/aladdin-sane-david-bowie-album-cover/), who also designed the first tongue logo, and Phil Jude. Relating to the album title, just not in the way the band intended. Not content with changing the image, the regime also insisted that Sister Morphine was dropped from the album, replaced by a live version of Chuck Berry's Let It Rock. General Franco versus the Rolling Stones. In a battle of cultural significance, it is safe to say that only one of them is still talked about. ![Sticky Fingers - The Other Cover](https://www.artbeforenoise.com/content/images/2026/05/Sticky-Fingers---The-other-cover.jpg) Sticky Fingers - The Other Cover --- ## The Lawsuit Nobody Talks About There is one final chapter to the *Sticky Fingers* cover story that rarely gets mentioned. Photographer Peter Webb was surprised to see that Warhol had made the cover for Sticky Fingers and that only one of his photos had been used as an insert. That wasn't the deal, according to Webb, and he filed a claim against the Rolling Stones. It took him thirty years before he was proven right and he eventually earned some money from the album. Thirty years. For a photograph used without proper agreement on one of the best selling albums in history. A quiet footnote to one of the most famous covers ever made. --- ## What Makes It Controversial In isolation, it is a close up photograph of a pair of jeans. That is all. There is no nudity. There is no explicit content. There is a zip. And yet in 1971, displaying a close-up of a male crotch on a major-label album was genuinely transgressive, and several countries initially refused to distribute the sleeve. What Warhol understood (and what made him a genius) was that suggestion is always more powerful than explicitness. The zip doesn't reveal anything shocking. What it suggests is far more interesting than anything it could actually show. VH1 named it the number one greatest album cover of all time in 2003\. A close up of a pair of jeans with a working zip. Conceived at a party. Photographed by persons unknown. Destroyed records during distribution. Banned by a fascist dictator. And we still don't know whose jeans they are. ### Hold It Up To A Mirror URL: https://www.artbeforenoise.com/licensed-to-ill-beastie-boys-album-cover/ Last updated: 2026-08-30T11:59:22.000Z When I first saw the cover for [*License to Ill*](https://amzn.to/41YERvy?ref=artbeforenoise.com) by the Beastie Boys, I thought it was the Beastie Boys on their own private jet. Three lads from New York, living their best lives at thirty thousand feet. Afterall, the logo on the tail confirmed it was their plane. They're totally on board that plane. They're flying somewhere loud and probably illegal. Good for them. I was wrong. The plane isn't flying. It's crashing. And the logo on the tail isn't just a logo. And the tail number isn't just a tail number. ![](https://www.artbeforenoise.com/content/images/2026/05/license-to-ill-album-cover.jpg) ### Album Anatomy | **Album** | *Licensed to Ill* | | ---------------- | -------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------- | | **Artist** | [Beastie Boys **Released**15 November 1986 **Label**](https://www.artbeforenoise.com/tag/beastie-boys/)[Def Jam Records](https://www.artbeforenoise.com/tag/def-jam-records/) / [Columbia Records](https://www.artbeforenoise.com/tag/columbia-records/) | | **On the cover** | An American Airlines Boeing 727 with a Beastie Boys logo on its tail, crashing into a mountain — the wreckage shaped like an extinguished joint, with a tail number that spells a rude message when held to a mirror | | **Design** | Concept by [Rick Rubin](https://www.artbeforenoise.com/tag/rick-rubin/); art direction by Stephen Byram; artwork by David Gambale ("World B. Omés") | | **Decade** | [1980s](https://www.artbeforenoise.com/tag/1980s/) | --- ## Rick Rubin, Led Zeppelin and a Private Jet The idea for the cover came from producer Rick Rubin, after reading [*Hammer of the Gods*](https://amzn.to/4cEPN6k?ref=artbeforenoise.com), the wild biography of Led Zeppelin's rock excess. In the book there is a photograph of the Led Zeppelin private jet. Rubin said: "The Beastie Boys were just a bunch of little guys and I wanted us to have a Beastie Boys jet." So the concept started as an act of pure ambition, three young men from New York who wanted to announce themselves to the world in the most outrageous way possible. If [Led Zeppelin](https://www.artbeforenoise.com/tag/led-zeppelin/) had a private jet, the Beastie Boys would have one too. Except theirs would be crashing into a mountain. The full album cover, front to back, features an American Airlines Boeing 727 with a Beastie Boys logo on its tail, crashing head-on into the side of a mountain, the wreckage taking the shape of an extinguished cannabis joint. The art director was Stephen Byram and the artwork was created by collage artist David Gambale, who worked under the name World B. Omés. Between them they took Rubin's concept and turned it into something that managed to be simultaneously funny, absurd, slightly dangerous and completely unforgettable. ![](https://www.artbeforenoise.com/content/images/2026/05/beastie-boys-licensed-to-ill-open-sleeve.webp) --- ## The Logo and The Number Here is where the cover stops being just a great image and becomes something closer to performance art. The Beastie Boys logo on the tail of the plane was intentionally designed to evoke the Harley-Davidson logo. Three young Jewish kids from New York appropriating the most iconic symbol of American biker culture and slapping it on a crashing plane. Subtle it is not. Perfect it is. And then there is the tail number. The registration number on the tail reads 3MTA3\. Held up to a mirror, it spells EAT ME. Just sit with that for a moment. Someone, and it was deliberate, designed an album cover where the tail number of the crashing plane is a rude message that only reveals itself in a mirror. In 1986\. On the fastest selling debut album in [Columbia Records](https://www.artbeforenoise.com/tag/columbia-records/) history. According to Rick Rubin, if you look at the cover sideways it looks like something else entirely that we will leave to your imagination. The Beastie Boys were not, it is fair to say, aiming for subtlety. --- ## The Name, The History and MCA *Licensed to Ill* became the first rap LP to top the Billboard 200 chart, and was eventually certified Diamond by the RIAA for shipping over ten million copies in the United States. On March 7, 1987, it topped the Billboard 200, the first [hip-hop album](https://www.artbeforenoise.com/3-feet-high-and-rising-de-la-soul-album-cover/) ever to do so. It then stayed there for seven straight weeks. Three young men, a crashing plane, a mirror trick, a Harley-Davidson logo and something else that you can probably make out changed music forever. It is worth pausing on that for a moment. In November 1986 the Billboard Top 10 was dominated by Bon Jovi, Huey Lewis, Lionel Richie and Madonna. *Licensed to Ill* crashed into that world (see what I did there?) and nothing was the same afterwards. Adam Yauch (MCA) died in May 2012 from cancer. He was 47\. In the week following his death, *Licensed to Ill* reached number one on Billboard's Catalog Albums chart. A whole new generation going back to find out where it all began. And finding that crashing plane with that naughty, little message hidden in the tail number. --- ## What The Cover Actually Says The cover of *Licensed to Ill* is not trying to be art. It is not trying to be profound. It is three young men announcing themselves to the world with maximum noise and minimum restraint, and hiding a joke in the tail number just to see who would notice. It worked because it was completely honest about what the Beastie Boys were in 1986\. Loud. Funny. In your face. And smarter than they wanted you to think. I thought it was their private jet. I thought they were on board, flying somewhere great. Until I opened it. ### The Night Ziggy Landed URL: https://www.artbeforenoise.com/ziggy-stardust-david-bowie-album-cover/ Last updated: 2026-08-23T10:51:14.000Z On the cover of [*The Rise and Fall of Ziggy Stardust and the Spiders from Mars*](https://amzn.to/49bOF9n?ref=artbeforenoise.com), David Bowie is not the cover. Not really. He's in it. Standing under a glowing sign on a dark, wet London street, guitar slung over his shoulder, one foot resting on something just out of frame. But he doesn't fill it. The street fills it. The darkness fills it. Bowie is just a small figure in a scene rather than the subject of a portrait. For one of the most famous album covers in history, that restraint is remarkable. ![The David Bowie Ziggy Stardust Cover is dark and gloomy](https://www.artbeforenoise.com/content/images/2026/05/david-bowie-the-rise-and-fall-of-ziggy-stardust-and-the-spiders-from-mars-album-cover.jpg) Ziggy Stardust - THIS is how you strike a pose. Album Anatomy | **Album** | *The Rise and Fall of Ziggy Stardust and the Spiders from Mars* | | ---------------- | ----------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------- | | **Artist** | [David Bowie](https://www.artbeforenoise.com/tag/david-bowie/) | | **Released** | 16 June 1972 | | **Label** | [RCA Records](https://www.artbeforenoise.com/tag/rca-records/) | | **On the cover** | Bowie as Ziggy Stardust, small in frame, standing under the K. West sign on a rain-soaked Heddon Street, guitar slung over his shoulder | | **Design** | Photography by [Brian Ward](https://www.artbeforenoise.com/tag/brian-ward/); colourised by [Terry Pastor](https://www.artbeforenoise.com/tag/terry-pastor/) | | **Decade** | [1970s](https://www.artbeforenoise.com/tag/1970s/) | --- ## Who Was Ziggy Stardust? Before we get to the street, we need to understand who is standing on it. By January 1972, David Bowie had released four studio albums to modest success. He was known, but not famous. Respected, but not iconic. He was searching for something different, something that would break through and would be as much a creative statement as a commercial one. What he landed on was one of the most audacious ideas in rock history. He would create a character, a fictional alien rock star named Ziggy Stardust, and he would become that character. Not as a costume or a gimmick, but as a sustained act of performance art that would blur the line between David Bowie the man and [Ziggy Stardust the alien](https://www.artbeforenoise.com/aladdin-sane-david-bowie-album-cover/) so thoroughly that even Bowie himself would struggle to find his way back. The album tells the story of an alien who comes to Earth, becomes a rock star messiah, gets consumed by fame and excess, and is ultimately destroyed by it. It is, in other words, a warning. And Bowie proceeded to live it out in real life almost exactly as the story described. --- ## A Brooklyn Alley in London The photos for the front and rear of the Ziggy Stardust album were taken on 13 January 1972 on a cold, wet night by photographer [Brian Ward](https://www.artbeforenoise.com/tag/brian-ward/), who had a first-floor studio at Heddon Street, London. [Heddon Street](https://maps.app.goo.gl/VwufYfskFFbogQrd9?ref=artbeforenoise.com) is a small, narrow backstreet just off Regent Street in central London. It is not glamorous. It is not particularly interesting. In 1972 it was lined with ordinary businesses and lit by ordinary streetlamps. According to Ward, Bowie had phoned him requesting a shooting location resembling a "Brooklyn alley scene" where he could appear alone like an alien being. Ward said: "He was playing on this Man from Mars thing. He wanted to come over like a real stranger, like a science fiction movie." The location was largely chosen for practical reasons, it was right outside Ward's studio. But what felt like a compromise turned into something extraordinary. After a while inside the studio, Ward suggested taking the shoot outside to catch the last light of the winter day. But it was cold, and it had started to rain, and the band were not eager to go outside and freeze. So Bowie grabbed a red Les Paul guitar he had borrowed from his friend Mark Pritchett, and headed out with Ward alone. Bowie wore a green jumpsuit, later featured in a performance on BBC music show The Old Grey Whistle Test, but hand coloured to appear blue on the sleeve. Bowie later said of the shoot: "It was cold and it rained and I felt like an actor." Altogether, 54 photos were taken. Outside on the wet street. In and around a red telephone box. Against damp brick walls. One of them, Bowie standing under the K. West sign, guitar slung over his shoulder, foot raised, the rain-slicked street stretching out behind him. This was the photo that became the one. ![The Starman Pub on Heddon St, just down from where The Ziggy Stardust album cover was shot.](https://www.artbeforenoise.com/content/images/2026/05/the-starman-pub-on-heddon-st.jpg) [The Starman Pub](https://thestarman.london/?ref=artbeforenoise.com) is found on Heddon St. You should grab a drink there. --- ## The Colour That Changed Everything The original photographs were shot entirely in black and white. What you see on the album cover, the vivid turquoise jumpsuit, the bright yellow hair, the otherworldly glow, is not what Brian Ward captured on Heddon Street that night. [RCA Records](https://www.artbeforenoise.com/tag/rca-records/) sent the black and white pictures to designer Terry Pastor to colourise them. He had worked with Bowie previously on the Hunky Dory album cover. Pastor chose bright colours for Ziggy Stardust's jumpsuit and hair, making him pop against the dark alley; reinforcing the concept of an alien descending to earth. It was a masterstroke. The dark, wet, ordinary London street became a landing pad. The unremarkable figure in the doorway became something genuinely otherworldly. The colourisation didn't just change how Bowie looked, it changed what the cover meant. --- ## The K. West Sign Look at the cover and above Bowie's head, slightly out of focus, you can read the letters K. West. You really can't miss it. It was the sign for a furrier (a business that sold fur coats)that occupied part of the premises at 23 Heddon Street. It meant nothing. It was just there. And yet. Bowie later told Rolling Stone: "It's such a shame that sign went. People read so much into it. They thought K. West must be some sort of code for quest. It took on all these sort of mystical overtones." The internet has since gone further. Some fans have pointed out that Kanye West, born in June 1977, five years after the album's release shares his surname with the sign. The album's opening track is called *Five Years*. Bowie, some suggest, predicted Kanye. It is the kind of conspiracy theory so absurd it almost earns respect. The sign was removed by an enthusiastic Bowie fan in 1982\. A replacement was later installed. Somewhere, presumably, someone still has the original. --- ## The Plaque For A Fictional Character Heddon Street today is almost unrecognisable from the narrow, rain-soaked backstreet in the photograph. It has been pedestrianised, lined with restaurants and bars, and has become something of a Bowie pilgrimage site. It is the the Abbey Road zebra crossing of the Bowie world. In 2012, a commemorative plaque was installed at Number 23, Heddon Street, unveiled by Spandau Ballet guitarist and Bowie superfan Gary Kemp. It states: "Ziggy Stardust 1972 - This marks the location of the cover photograph for the iconic David Bowie album The Rise and Fall of Ziggy Stardust and the Spiders from Mars." The plaque is one of just a small handful in London extended to fictional characters, alongside Sherlock Holmes and Lara Croft. A plaque. For an alien. On a backstreet off Regent Street. Where a man stood in the rain holding a borrowed guitar for less than an hour on a January night in 1972. --- ## Where Is He? The first time I saw this cover, my first thought was: Where is he? Now, I know. He's on Heddon Street, London. He's standing under a furrier's sign that would be stolen a decade later. He's wearing a green jumpsuit that would be coloured blue by a designer in a separate room weeks afterwards. He's holding a guitar that isn't his. It's raining. And he is in the process of becoming one of the most iconic figures in the history of popular music. The cover works because Bowie understood something that very few artists understand; that mystery is more powerful than presence. By not filling the frame, by letting the street and the darkness and the rain do the work, he created an image that pulls you in rather than pushing itself at you. ### Say Nothing URL: https://www.artbeforenoise.com/album-covers-no-text/ Last updated: 2026-08-31T13:32:35.000Z Most album covers shout at you. Band name. Album title. Sometimes a logo. Sometimes all three, in a font chosen to tell you exactly what kind of music is inside before you've heard a single note. And then there are the ones that say nothing at all. No name. No title. Just an image, confident enough to stand completely alone. These are nine of the best. --- ## 1\. The Beatles - Abbey Road (1969) ![](https://www.artbeforenoise.com/content/images/2026/05/hidden-features-on-the-beatles-abbey-road-album-cover.jpg) Four men crossing a road. [No band name](https://www.artbeforenoise.com/yeezus-kanye-west-album-cover/). No album title. Just a zebra crossing on a quiet London street and four of the most famous musicians in the world walking across it in a line. The cover was photographed by Iain Macmillan in under ten minutes, standing on a stepladder in the middle of the road while a police officer held back traffic. It is one of the most imitated images in music history. It needs no words because the four people on it are the words. They are walking away from the studio and each other, a physical manifestation of the record's sonic climax. Just as "I Want You (She's So Heavy)" builds its massive, suffocating groove only to be brutally chopped off in mid-second, this photo catches the exact moment the greatest band on earth decided they were done. Add it to your collection - [*Abbey Road - The Beatles*](https://amzn.to/3OsVi0d?ref=artbeforenoise.com) Abbey Road doesn't give up its secrets easily. This cover has more than one hiding in plain sight, head over to [Look Closer](https://www.artbeforenoise.com/album-covers-hidden-details/) to discover it. --- ## 2\. Pink Floyd - The Dark Side of the Moon (1973) ![](https://www.artbeforenoise.com/content/images/2026/05/pink-floyd-dark-side-of-the-moon.jpg) A beam of white light strikes a prism and splits into a spectrum of colour against a black background. No band name. No album title. Nothing. Designed by Hipgnosis and drawn by George Hardie, the brief from keyboardist Richard Wright was simple: *"something clean, elegant and graphic."* The image has since sold over 45 million copies, been projected onto buildings worldwide, and appeared on Royal Mail stamps. It remains the most [recognisable piece of graphic design](https://www.artbeforenoise.com/wish-you-were-here-pink-floyd-album-cover/) in the history of rock music. And it still has no words on it. Add it to your collection - [*Pink Floyd - The Dark Side of the Moon*](https://amzn.to/3R26zVQ?ref=artbeforenoise.com) --- ## 3\. Led Zeppelin - Led Zeppelin IV (1971) ![](https://www.artbeforenoise.com/content/images/2026/05/led-zeppelin-iv-album-cover.jpg) Again, no band name. No album title. Not even a record label. Just an old framed photograph of a man carrying a bundle of sticks on his back, hanging on a crumbling wall. The album has no official title. Fans call it *Led Zeppelin IV* or *Four Symbols* or *Zoso*, but none of those names appear anywhere on the cover. Jimmy Page insisted on the textless design as a deliberate rejection of the music industry's obsession with branding. EMI were baffled. The album sold 37 million copies. Page was right. Add it to your collection - [*Led Zeppelin - Led Zeppelin IV*](https://amzn.to/4ufWao8?ref=artbeforenoise.com) --- --- ## 4\. The Beatles - The White Album (1968) ![](https://www.artbeforenoise.com/content/images/2026/05/the-beatles-white-album.jpg) Pure white. The artist's name embossed so faintly it almost disappears. A serial number stamped in the corner. Nothing else. Designed by pop artist Richard Hamilton, it was a radical counterpoint to the maximalist explosion of *Sgt. Pepper* the year before. Every copy had its own unique serial number, making each one technically a limited edition. The cover said nothing. The music inside said everything. Add it to your collection - [*The Beatles - The White Album*](https://amzn.to/4sU4x7x?ref=artbeforenoise.com) --- ## 5\. David Bowie - Blackstar (2016) ![](https://www.artbeforenoise.com/content/images/2026/05/hidden-features-on-david-bowies-blackstar-album-cover.jpg) Five stars arranged in a pattern. No name. No title. Released two days before Bowie's death, the cover was designed by Jonathan Barnbrook and hidden within it was one final secret. The five stars on the cover are missing points in just the right places to spell out the word "BOWIE" if you [know where to look](https://www.artbeforenoise.com/aladdin-sane-david-bowie-album-cover/). A message hidden in plain sight on a cover with no visible text. Bowie's last trick. Typically extraordinary. Add it to your collection - [*David Bowie - Blackstar*](https://amzn.to/4cA7nK5?ref=artbeforenoise.com) --- ## 6\. Metallica - The Black Album (1991) ![](https://www.artbeforenoise.com/content/images/2026/05/metallica-the-black-album.png) Almost entirely black. The Metallica logo and a coiled snake are visible only if you hold the record at exactly the right angle in the right light. The band called it *The Black Album* themselves. Nothing on the front cover confirms that. Produced by Bob Rock, it became the best selling album of the SoundScan era with over 16 million copies sold in the United States alone. A near-blank cover for the album that made them the biggest band in the world. Add it to your collection - [*Metallica - The Black Album*](https://amzn.to/4cAKQNo?ref=artbeforenoise.com) --- ## 7\. New Order - Power, Corruption & Lies (1983) ![](https://www.artbeforenoise.com/content/images/2026/05/new-order-power-corruption-lies.jpg) A painting of roses. No text. No band name. No album title. The painting, *A Basket of Roses* by Henri Fantin-Latour was chosen by designer Peter Saville after he spotted it at the National Gallery in London. Saville had already designed [*Unknown Pleasures*](https://www.artbeforenoise.com/unknown-pleasures-joy-division-album-cover/) for Joy Division. Here he placed a colour-coded chart around the edge of the sleeve, a simple graphic device that, if you knew how to read it, spelled out the album title. The information was there. You just had to work for it. Add it to your collection - [*New Order - Power, Corruption & Lies*](https://amzn.to/3OsW90V?ref=artbeforenoise.com) --- ## 8\. Sigur Rós - ( ) (2002) ![](https://www.artbeforenoise.com/content/images/2026/05/sigur-ros-album-cover.jpg) Parentheses. That is the album title, literally two brackets with nothing inside them. The cover is a blurred, hazy photograph; warm light, indistinct shapes, deliberately impossible to read. The album itself was recorded entirely in a made-up language that Sigur Rós called Hopelandic. No real words in the music. No real words on the cover. A completely self-contained world that existed entirely on its own terms. Add it to your collection - [*Sigur Rós - ( )*](https://amzn.to/41UlIuT?ref=artbeforenoise.com) --- ## 9\. The White Stripes - Elephant (2003) ![](https://www.artbeforenoise.com/content/images/2026/05/the-white-stripes-elephant.jpg) Jack and Meg White resting against an amplifier in a red room. No text anywhere. Jack White later revealed the pose was deliberately composed to suggest the shape of an elephant's head, subtle enough that you might look at the cover for years before suddenly seeing it. A hidden image on a cover with no words to distract you from looking. Exactly the point. Add it to your collection - [*The White Stripes - Elephant*](https://amzn.to/3OM0FaE?ref=artbeforenoise.com) --- *Which textless cover belongs on this list that we missed? Let me know via the comments section.* ### 10050 Cielo Drive URL: https://www.artbeforenoise.com/nine-inch-nails-downward-spiral-album-cover/ Last updated: 2026-08-23T10:45:23.000Z This post is different to anything else I've written on Art Before Noise so far. Granted, I have only written 6 posts before this one. However, this involves real people, real tragedy, and real consequences. It deserves to be handled with care. So that's what I'm going to try to do. Nine Inch Nails are one of the great bands. [*The Downward Spiral*](https://amzn.to/4sZbAMp?ref=artbeforenoise.com) is one of the great albums of the 1990s. And its cover, a blurred, abstract image of what appears to be a wall or a surface, dark and indistinct never really stood out to me. I assumed it was some sort of Trent Reznor art project. Dark imagery for a [dark album](https://www.artbeforenoise.com/beatles-butcher-cover-yesterday-and-today/). I think most people would agree? I had no idea what I was actually looking at. ![](https://www.artbeforenoise.com/content/images/2026/05/the-downward-spiral-has-a-dark-history.jpg) ### Album Anatomy | **Album** | *The Downward Spiral* | | ---------------- | -------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------- | | **Artist** | [Nine Inch Nails **Released**8 March 1994 **Label**](https://www.artbeforenoise.com/tag/nine-inch-nails/)[Nothing Records](https://www.artbeforenoise.com/tag/nothing-records/) / [Interscope Records](https://www.artbeforenoise.com/tag/interscope-records/) | | **On the cover** | A close-up, heavily processed and abstract image; dark, textured and difficult to read, widely interpreted as evoking the walls of the house where it was recorded | | **Design** | Artwork by Russell Mills; photography by David Buckland | | **Decade** | [1990s](https://www.artbeforenoise.com/tag/1990s/) | --- ## The Night of August 9, 1969 Before we can talk about the album, we need to talk about what happened at 10050 Cielo Drive in Benedict Canyon, Los Angeles, on the night of August 9, 1969. The home became the scene of the murders of the eight-months-pregnant Sharon Tate, Wojciech Frykowski, Abigail Folger, Jay Sebring, and Steven Parent, committed by Tex Watson, Susan Atkins, and Patricia Krenwinkel; members of the Manson Family cult. Sharon Tate was 26 years old. She was a rising Hollywood actress, the wife of director Roman Polanski, and eight months pregnant with their son. She died alongside four others in one of the most shocking acts of violence in American history. The murders cast a shadow over Hollywood and over an entire generation. Author Joan Didion wrote: "Many people I know in Los Angeles believe that the Sixties ended abruptly on August 9, 1969, ended at the exact moment when word of the murders on Cielo Drive traveled like brushfire through the community." The house at 10050 Cielo Drive stood for another 25 years. And then Trent Reznor moved in. --- ## The Cheapest House On The List In Reznor's own words: "We were looking for a place to work on the album, and I saw a number of places, and one of them happened to be the house where the Tate murders occurred. But no one told us that. You can imagine a realtor not wanting to mention that. I just didn't know. That place sits up on a hill overlooking Beverly Hills, with the ocean on one side and downtown in the other direction. It was a cool, tranquil little ranch house with a nice yard. And it was cheaper than the rest of them. That's always a clue." A few weeks after moving in, a friend noticed something. They got a copy of *Helter Skelter*, the definitive account of the Manson murders and checked. There was the same bedroom. The same front door. The same pool. Reznor already knew about the Manson murders. He had read *Helter Skelter* as a kid. And now he was living in the house where it happened. What he did next is where the controversy begins. --- ## Le Pig Rather than move out, Reznor stayed. He transformed the house into a recording studio and named it "Le Pig", a reference to the word "Pig" that murderer Susan Atkins had written in Sharon Tate's blood on the front door of the house on the night of the murders. He also recorded the music video for "Gave Up" at the property, and brought in Marilyn Manson, an artist whose name was itself constructed by combining Marilyn Monroe and Charles Manson, to record sections of his debut album there. The album being recorded in this house was *The Downward Spiral*. A concept album about self destruction, violence, addiction and suicide. The darkest album of Reznor's career, made in the darkest location imaginable. Reznor called his first night in the house "terrifying." He stayed for eighteen months. ![Trent Reznor performing live in concert](https://www.artbeforenoise.com/content/images/2026/05/trent-reznor-performing-live-in-concert.jpg) SomewhatDamaged2, CC BY 2.0 [https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/2.0](https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/2.0?ref=artbeforenoise.com), via Wikimedia Commons --- ## The Moment Everything Changed Whatever you think of Reznor's decision to record there, what happened next is impossible not to respect. One day, during the recording sessions, Reznor had a chance encounter with Sharon Tate's sister, Patti. She asked him directly: "Are you exploiting my sister's death by living in her house?" In his own words: "For the first time the whole thing kind of slapped me in the face. I said, 'No, it's just sort of my own interest in American folklore. I'm in this place where a weird part of history occurred.' I guess it never really struck me before, but it did then. She lost her sister from a senseless, ignorant situation that I don't want to support. When she was talking to me, I realized for the first time, 'What if it was my sister?' I thought, 'Fuck Charlie Manson.' I went home and cried that night." Reznor moved out in December 1993, later explaining: "There was too much history in that house for me to handle." --- ## The Door Here is the detail that makes this story truly extraordinary. When Reznor moved out of 10050 Cielo Drive, he took the notorious front door with him. The door that still had Sharon Tate's blood concealed beneath layers of paint and installed it as the entrance to his new recording studio in New Orleans, a former funeral home, where he recorded *The Fragile* in 1999. The house itself was demolished in early 1994, shortly after Reznor moved out. A new house was constructed on the site and the address was changed to 10066 Cielo Drive. The new owner told Los Angeles magazine: "We went to great pains to get rid of everything. There's no house, no dirt, no blade of grass remotely connected to Sharon Tate." The door eventually passed from Reznor's possession and was later [put up for auction](https://www.invaluable.com/auction-lot/sharon-tate-10050-cielo-drive-residence-front-door-1029-c-dfa4db99ab?ref=artbeforenoise.com) through Julien's Auctions. A piece of one of history's darkest nights, sold to the highest bidder. It is a deeply uncomfortable conclusion to an already uncomfortable story. --- ## The Cover Remember, this blog is about the art of the cover. The Art Before Noise. So, what the hell does all of this have to do with the album cover? The cover of *The Downward Spiral* is a close up, heavily processed photograph; abstract, dark, and difficult to read. It has been interpreted as a wall, a surface, a texture. Some have suggested it references the walls of 10050 Cielo Drive. Others see it as purely abstract imagery in keeping with the album's themes. Reznor has never fully explained it. Which feels right. Some things are better left without an explanation. What I know is this. The first time I looked at that cover I thought it was just something that Reznor had thrown together for the cover. It is a light texture. There are some dark spots. There is background noise. But now that I know where this album was made, and what happened in that house, and what it cost everyone involved, the cover looks different to me. It looks like a wall that has absorbed too much history. Dark, indistinct, impossible to fully understand. That might be exactly what it is. --- *Art Before Noise acknowledges the victims of the Tate murders: Sharon Tate, Wojciech Frykowski, Abigail Folger, Jay Sebring, and Steven Parent. Their lives mattered far more than any album.* ### Stolen From A Pub Toilet URL: https://www.artbeforenoise.com/rumours-fleetwood-mac-album-cover/ Last updated: 2026-08-23T08:48:38.000Z The cover of [*Rumours*](https://amzn.to/4sVN0fi?ref=artbeforenoise.com) is not the most visually exciting album cover we've looked at on this blog. There's no [pulsar data](https://www.artbeforenoise.com/unknown-pleasures-joy-division-album-cover/), no [screaming woman](https://artbeforenoise.com/maggot-brain-funkadelic-album-cover/?ref=artbeforenoise.com) emerging from the earth, no [raw meat](https://artbeforenoise.com/beatles-butcher-cover-yesterday-and-today/?ref=artbeforenoise.com). It's two people standing against a light background looking theatrical. I came to this album later in life and when I finally added a copy to my collection, I remember thinking the cover was a bit meh. And then I started reading about it. Because what looks like a straightforward promotional photograph is actually a document of one of the most chaotic, drug-fuelled, romantically catastrophic recording sessions in music history. And once you know that, the cover looks completely different. ![](https://www.artbeforenoise.com/content/images/2026/05/fleetwood-mac-rumours-front-cover.jpg) ### Album Anatomy | **Album** | *Rumours* | | ---------------- | ------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------ | | **Artist** | [Fleetwood Mac **Released**4 February 1977 **Label**](https://www.artbeforenoise.com/tag/fleetwood-mac/)[Warner Bros Records](https://www.artbeforenoise.com/tag/warner-bros-records/) | | **On the cover** | Mick Fleetwood and Stevie Nicks in a theatrical dance pose against a light background, with a pair of wooden lavatory-chain balls hanging between Fleetwood's legs; the rest of the band appears on the back cover | | **Design** | Photography by [Herbert Worthington III](https://www.artbeforenoise.com/tag/herbert-worthington/) | | **Decade** | [1970s](https://www.artbeforenoise.com/tag/1970s/) | --- ## Forty Five Minutes With A Band Falling Apart When photographer Herbert Worthington III arrived at the studio in early 1977 to shoot the cover, every romantic relationship within the band had recently ended or was actively disintegrating. Mick Fleetwood and his wife Jenny had separated. John and Christine McVie had divorced. Lindsey Buckingham and Stevie Nicks had split acrimoniously. Worthington had forty five minutes with a band that was in the process of tearing itself apart. His job was to make five people who could barely stand to be in the same room look like a unified band. He chose to put just two of them on the front cover; Mick Fleetwood and Stevie Nicks. The concept came from the band's desire for something [theatrical and slightly mystical](https://www.artbeforenoise.com/renaissance-beyonce-album-cover/), a counterpoint to the emotionally naked music within. Worthington photographed them in a dance pose inspired by the English dance tradition. The rest of the band, John McVie, Christine McVie, and Lindsey Buckingham were relegated to the back cover. Five people, two on the front, three on the back. A quiet visual statement about the fractures running through the band. --- ## About Those Balls Let's address the obvious. Those balls. Those smooth, round balls. Hanging between Mick Fleetwood's legs on the cover are two wooden balls on chains. And yes, the internet has had a lot of fun with this over the years. But the story behind them is better than any joke you could make. Those balls are actually lavatory chains that Fleetwood ripped from a toilet earlier in his career. As Fleetwood himself explained: "I must admit I had a couple of glasses of English ale and came out of the toilet with these. I was very destructive. I ripped them off the toilet and had them hanging down between my legs." He went on to say: "In truth, I started off as a blues player. The whole ethic of a lot of blues music is slightly suggestive, might I say. And suitably, I walked out on stage with these two lavatory chains with these wooden balls hanging down, and after that, it just stuck." They became his lucky charm. They hung from his drumkit at every Fleetwood Mac gig. And when it came time to shoot the cover of *Rumours*, they came along too. So yes, they are toilet chains. Stolen from a pub. By a slightly drunk drummer. Now stick out like....well, balls, one of the best selling albums in history. ![](https://www.artbeforenoise.com/content/images/2026/05/rumours-the-back-cover.png) The back of Rumours by Fleetwood Mac --- ## What The Cover Actually Says The cover did not win any design awards and has never been considered a masterpiece of graphic art. Yet it has become one of the most recognisable album images in popular music through sheer commercial exposure. Rumours has sold over forty million copies worldwide. Two people. A light background. A crystal ball. And a pair of stolen toilet chains. It shouldn't work. ### Screaming From The Earth URL: https://www.artbeforenoise.com/maggot-brain-funkadelic-album-cover/ Last updated: 2026-08-23T08:46:42.000Z I came across [*Maggot Brain*](https://amzn.to/3QwoZho?ref=artbeforenoise.com) later in life. It wasn't part of my teenage years the way [Kick](https://www.artbeforenoise.com/inxs-kick-album-cover/) was, or something I'd grown up seeing on the walls of my uncles (I have many uncles)or family friends. I stumbled across it the way you stumble across a lot of things; the internet. My first reaction to the cover was not what you might expect. I didn't think it was iconic. I didn't think it was art. I thought it was the work of an unknown band trying to manufacture controversy in order to shift a few extra copies. A screaming woman's head emerging from the earth. The name *Maggot Brain* in jagged lettering. It looked like a band playing at being shocking. I moved on from it. I wasn't going to allow this album to waste my time. I had better, more interesting albums to look at and listen to. Turns out, I was wrong. I was an idiot. But, this blog post isn't about an amazing album that you should totally listen to, this is about that cover. ![Maggot Brain by Funkadelic. Is it just a head? or is she buried up to her neck?](https://www.artbeforenoise.com/content/images/2026/05/maggot-brain-by-funkadelic-album-cover.jpg) Album Anatomy | **Album** | *Maggot Brain* | | ---------------- | ------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------- | | **Artist** | [Funkadelic **Released**12 July 1971 **Label**](https://www.artbeforenoise.com/tag/funkadelic/)[Westbound Records](https://www.artbeforenoise.com/tag/westbound-records/) | | **On the cover** | A screaming woman's head; model Barbara Cheeseborough emerging from (or buried in) the earth, with only a skull remaining on the back cover | | **Design** | Photography by [Joel Brodsky](https://www.artbeforenoise.com/tag/joel-brodsky/) | | **Decade** | [1970s](https://www.artbeforenoise.com/tag/1970s/) | --- ## The World In 1971 To understand the cover of *Maggot Brain* you first need to understand the world it was born into. In the three years before the album was released in July 1971, Martin Luther King Jr had been assassinated, Robert F. Kennedy had been assassinated, the Vietnam War waged on, The Beatles had broken up, and Charles Manson had orchestrated his atrocity in the Hollywood hills. 1971 must have been awful to live through. America was on fire. And Funkadelic, a psychedelic funk band from Detroit led by the extraordinary George Clinton, were paying attention. *Maggot Brain* was Funkadelic's third studio album, recorded at United Sound Systems in Detroit during late [1970 and early 1971](https://www.artbeforenoise.com/best-album-covers-1970s/). It arrived at a moment when Black America was exhausted, angry, and reaching for something that felt honest about the state of the world. Clinton gave them that. --- ## The Name Before we get to the cover, we need to talk about the name. Because the name is where this story gets dark. There are those who say that *Maggot Brain* was Eddie Hazel's nickname, and that the album was named after him. But countering stories stake a darker claim that the title actually references George Clinton discovering his brother's decomposing dead body in a New Jersey apartment. His skull had cracked open, and the maggot-like folds of the brain were exposed. Clinton has never fully confirmed or denied either story. Both may be true. Neither makes the name any easier to sit with. The album opens with a spoken word monologue by Clinton which refers to "the maggots in the mind of the universe." It is not a comfortable listen. It was never meant to be. --- ## The Cover The cover artwork depicts a screaming black woman's head coming out of the earth. It was photographed by Joel Brodsky and features model [Barbara Cheeseborough](https://www.npr.org/sections/codeswitch/2013/11/18/246049802/an-appreciation-essences-cover-girl-barbara-cheeseborough?ref=artbeforenoise.com). Her eyes are closed. A cry seems to escape her mouth. Maggots are nowhere to be seen, but can be guessed to be everywhere: in her afro, in the soil surrounding her. On the back cover, only a bony skull remains of her countenance. It is one of the most striking images ever put on an album cover. And like all great cover art, it raises more questions than it answers. Is she severed or buried beneath the neck? Is she laughing or screaming? The ambiguity is part of the beauty. Photographer Joel Brodsky had a difficult brief. He was handed the title *Maggot Brain* and asked to create an image that matched it. What he produced, a woman simultaneously emerging from and being consumed by the earth manages to be terrifying and beautiful at the same time. --- ## The Process Church Here is where the story takes an unexpected turn. The album's liner notes are a polemic on fear provided by the Process Church of the Final Judgement. The Process Church was a secretive religious organisation founded in London in the 1960s, with a theology that drew on both Christ and Satan as complementary forces. By 1971 they had developed a reputation that was partly deserved, partly manufactured. It was a sinister cult with alleged connections to Charles Manson. According to author Rickey Vincent, the organisation's alleged association with the Manson Family, along with the album's foreboding themes and striking artwork, lent Funkadelic the image of a death-worshipping black rock band. Clinton was aware of exactly what he was doing. Darkness was the point. The liner notes read: "Fear is at the root of man's destruction of himself. Without fear there is no blame. Without blame there is no conflict. Without conflict there is no destruction. But there IS fear - deep within the core of every human being it lurks like a monster, dark and intangible." Heavy stuff. For a funk album. ![Funkadelic in 1972](https://www.artbeforenoise.com/content/images/2026/05/funkadelic-in-1972.png) Funkadelic in 1972 --- ## Eddie Hazel and the Guitar Solo That Changed Everything No piece about *Maggot Brain* is complete without talking about Eddie Hazel. Because the title track, ten minutes of largely improvised guitar, is one of the most extraordinary pieces of music ever recorded. George Clinton, reportedly under the influence of LSD during the recording session, told Hazel to play as if he had been told his mother was dead; to picture that day, what he would feel, how he would make sense of his life, how he would take a measure of everything inside him. The track was recorded in one take. Though several other musicians performed on it, Clinton largely faded them out of the final mix so that the focus would be entirely on Hazel's impressive guitar skills. Rolling Stone ranked the song 60th on their list of the 100 Greatest Guitar Songs. Music critic Greg Tate described it as Funkadelic's *A Love Supreme*, a reference to John Coltrane's masterpiece of spiritual jazz. High praise for an album called *Maggot Brain*, don't you think? --- ## The Cool, Smooth Surprise Here is the thing that nobody tells you about *Maggot Brain* before you listen to it for the first time. You look at that cover, the screaming woman, the dark earth, the name in jagged letters and you brace yourself for something aggressive and uncomfortable. Something that is going to hurt your ears. And then you press play. And it's cool. And smooth. And in places, genuinely beautiful. That contrast, between the darkness of the cover and the warmth of the music, is exactly what great album art is supposed to do. It prepares you for a different version of the experience than the one you actually have. It makes the music surprising. It makes you lean in. George Clinton understood this perfectly. The cover tells you one story. The music tells you another. The truth is somewhere between the two. --- ## What The Cover Actually Means Some argue that the woman on the cover represents Mother Earth herself. That *Maggot Brain* is about [embracing Blackness and Black people](https://www.artbeforenoise.com/to-pimp-a-butterfly-kendrick-lamar-album-cover/), about [rising above](https://www.artbeforenoise.com/renaissance-beyonce-album-cover/) all the fears and the difficulties of living in a white supremacist America. Others see it more simply; a visual representation of the album's opening monologue. The maggots in the mind of the universe. Birth and death occupying the same image simultaneously. Both readings are valid. Both are probably correct. What I know is this; the first time I saw that cover I dismissed it as the work of a band trying too hard. And I was completely wrong. The cover of *Maggot Brain* is one of the most considered, most layered, and most honest pieces of album art ever made. It doesn't dress anything up. It doesn't make the world look better than it is. In 1971, at the height of Vietnam, Manson, and the slow collapse of the American dream, it was a revolutionary act. It still makes me smile and disturbs me at the same time. I think that was always the point. ### Raw Deal URL: https://www.artbeforenoise.com/beatles-butcher-cover-yesterday-and-today/ Last updated: 2026-08-23T08:43:32.000Z When I first came across the cover of *Yesterday and Today* by [The Beatles](https://www.artbeforenoise.com/tag/the-beatles/) I genuinely thought it was a bootleg. It didn't look like a Beatles cover. It didn't feel like a Beatles cover. Four men in white smocks, grinning like schoolboys, draped in raw meat and dismembered baby dolls. I assumed someone had mocked it up. A joke. A complete fake. It is not a fake. It is one of the most controversial, most valuable, and [most fascinating album covers](https://www.artbeforenoise.com/album-covers-hidden-details/) in the history of recorded music. ![The Beatles cover that shocked America and the world, Yesterday and Today](https://www.artbeforenoise.com/content/images/2026/05/Yeterday-and-Today-Album-Cover.jpg) The Beatles - Yesterday and Today ### Album Anatomy | **Album** | *Yesterday and Today* | | ---------------- | ------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------ | | **Artist** | [The Beatles **Released**15 June 1966 **Label**](https://www.artbeforenoise.com/tag/the-beatles/)[Capitol Records](https://www.artbeforenoise.com/tag/capitol-records/) | | **On the cover** | The band in white butcher smocks, grinning, draped in raw meat and dismembered baby doll parts; the "Butcher Cover," recalled within days and replaced with a photo of the band around a steamer trunk | | **Design** | Photography by [Robert Whitaker](https://www.artbeforenoise.com/tag/robert-whitaker/) | | **Decade** | [1960s](https://www.artbeforenoise.com/tag/1960s/) | --- ## The Album Nobody Outside America Knew About First things first. *Yesterday and Today* was released only in the United States and Canada in June 1966\. If you grew up outside North America, you almost certainly never encountered it in a record shop. This is why it has that bootleg quality, because for most of the world, it simply didn't exist. Before 1967, [Capitol Records](https://www.artbeforenoise.com/tag/capitol-records/) repeatedly configured Beatles releases differently for the North American market, holding back tracks from UK releases to spread them across more albums and generate additional revenue. *Yesterday and Today* was a classic example. A collection of songs stitched together from *Help!*, *Rubber Soul* and tracks that would later appear on *Revolver*, packaged as a standalone album purely for commercial reasons. The Beatles were not happy about this practice. And that frustration, some argue, is precisely what the cover was about. --- ## The Photographer With A Vision The image was the brainchild of [Robert Whitaker](https://www.robertwhitakerphotography.com/?ref=artbeforenoise.com), a 26 year old Australian photographer whose dark humour and love of the surreal made him one of the band's favourite cameramen. On 25 March 1966, Whitaker hosted a photo session with the Beatles at his studio in Chelsea. Having spent three months away from the public eye, the band members had expanded their interests and were eager to depart from the formula imposed on them as pop stars. Whitaker similarly had ambitions that the session should break new ground; he planned a conceptual art piece titled *A Somnambulant Adventure*, conceived as a comment on the Beatles' fame. Whitaker assembled props including plastic doll parts, trays of meat, white butchers' coats, a hammer and nails, a birdcage, cardboard boxes, and sets of false teeth and eyes. The Beatles, tired of the usual photo shoots and finding the concept compatible with their own black humour, played along willingly. Crucially, none of these photos were taken with the intention of using them for an album cover. They were part of a larger artistic statement on fame and idol worship. Whitaker had no idea what he had inadvertently set in motion. ![](https://www.artbeforenoise.com/content/images/2026/05/Bob-Whitaker---Today.jpg) ![](https://www.artbeforenoise.com/content/images/2026/05/Robert-Whitaker.jpg) Rob Whitaker --- ## How It Ended Up On The Cover A few months after the shoot, Capitol Records began assembling *Yesterday and Today*. [The Beatles](https://www.artbeforenoise.com/album-covers-hidden-details/#1-the-beatlesabbey-road-1969)' management submitted photographs from Whitaker's session for consideration and one of them was chosen. Lennon, in an interview shortly before his death in 1980, said the shot was "inspired by our boredom and resentment at having to do another photo session and another Beatles thing." He also made his feelings about the controversy clear. Lennon said the butcher sleeve was "[as relevant as Vietnam](https://www.beatlesstory.com/blog/memorabilia-the-yesterday-and-today-album-covers/?ref=artbeforenoise.com)", adding that "if the public can accept something as cruel as the war, they can accept this cover." McCartney called their critics "soft." The cover was, depending on who you believe, a comment on the Vietnam War, a protest against Capitol Records butchering their album releases for profit, or simply a piece of surrealist art that got wildly misread. Whitaker himself called the Capitol protest theory "rubbish. Absolute nonsense." The truth is probably all three, and none of them. It was a photograph taken in a spirit of creative rebellion by four young men who were exhausted by their own fame, repurposed as an album cover, and unleashed on an unsuspecting public. --- ## The Recall The backlash was immediate. [Capitol Records](https://www.artbeforenoise.com/tag/capitol-records/) sent a statement to reviewers explaining that the cover design was "subject to misinterpretation" and that to "avoid any possible controversy or undeserved harm to the Beatles' image or reputation" they had chosen to withdraw the LP and substitute a more generally acceptable design. What followed was [one of the most expensive damage control operations](https://www.artbeforenoise.com/appetite-for-destruction-guns-n-roses-album-cover/) in music industry history. A special staff spent one weekend extracting each of the 750,000 discs from its Butcher sleeve, at a cost of $200,000\. A new cover, a perfectly ordinary photograph of the band gathered around a steamer trunk, also taken by Whitaker was hastily substituted. Tens of thousands of already printed covers were sent to a landfill, at least 50,000 of them ended up in a deep watery pit that was filled with earth over one weekend at the end of June 1966. To save money, many copies simply had the new trunk image pasted directly over the original butcher cover. Which, as it turned out, was a decision that would haunt Capitol for decades. ![The very boring cover that replaced the original Yesterday and Today by The Beatles](https://www.artbeforenoise.com/content/images/2026/05/Yesterday-and-Today---The-Boring-Cover.jpg) Yesterday and Today - The Boring Cover --- ## The Collectors' Holy Grail Since some of Capitol's pressing plants merely pasted the trunk image onto the existing LP covers, the album encouraged a phenomenon of stripping back the top layer of artwork in the search for a banned butcher cover underneath. Fans with a copy of the trunk version began carefully steaming and peeling back the pasted image and sometimes finding the butcher cover perfectly preserved beneath. *Yesterday and Today* was the only Beatles record to lose money for Capitol. The irony being that the cover which cost them $200,000 to recall ultimately created the most valuable Beatles collectible in existence. In 1987, Alan Livingston, then president of Capitol Records, released for sale 24 first state butcher covers from his private collection; albums he had taken from the warehouse before they were pasted over and kept in a closet at his home. These so called Livingston Butchers today command premium prices among collectors, the five stereo versions being the most rare and valuable. In 2006, one sealed mono copy sold at auction for close to $39,000. --- ## What The Band Actually Thought The Beatles themselves were divided. Harrison later dismissed the butcher cover as "gross" and "stupid", adding: "Sometimes we all did stupid things thinking it was cool and hip when it was naïve and dumb; and that was one of them." Lennon, characteristically, was more defiant (at least initially). When interviewed during the band's 1966 US tour, however, he called the image "unsubtle", and said he and Harrison might have fought the recall decision had the photo been better. McCartney has largely stayed quiet on the subject over the years. Which, given his initial response of calling the critics "soft," is perhaps its own kind of answer. --- ## What It Actually Means Here is the thing about the butcher cover. Strip away [the controversy](https://www.artbeforenoise.com/nevermind-nirvana-album-cover/), the recall, the collectors' market, and the mythology and you're left with a photograph of four young men who were suffocating under the weight of their own fame, reaching for something that felt honest and real and deliberately uncomfortable. They were The Beatles. They could do anything. And what they chose to do, in the spring of 1966, was put on butcher's coats and stare down the camera with raw meat in their hands. Was it gross? Probably. Was it stupid? Maybe. Was it naïve? Possibly. Was it funny? I think so. However, it was also brave. And it was real. And fifty years later it remains the most talked about, most sought after, and most misunderstood album cover The Beatles ever made. I still think it looks like a bootleg. ### Look Closer URL: https://www.artbeforenoise.com/album-covers-hidden-details/ Last updated: 2026-07-26T12:43:04.000Z Some album covers reward you instantly. Others make you work for it. This list is about the second kind; the covers that hide something just beneath the surface, waiting for the right pair of eyes. Put down your phone, unless you are reading this blog post on your phone, that would be weird. Now, grab that album and have a closer look. --- ## 1\. The Beatles - Abbey Road (1969) ![](https://www.artbeforenoise.com/content/images/2026/05/hidden-features-on-the-beatles-abbey-road-album-cover-1.jpg) Everyone knows the cover. Four men walking across a zebra crossing. But look closer and the conspiracy theories start. Fans claimed the cover depicted a funeral procession: John in white as the priest, Ringo in black as the undertaker, George in denim as the gravedigger, and Paul, barefoot and out of step, as the corpse. And that Volkswagen Beetle parked in the background? Its number plate reads LMW 28IF. Twenty eight IF, as in, Paul would have been 28 if he were still alive. Some people claimed this meant Paul *would* have been **28** years old **IF** he were still alive when the album was released. (In reality, the album came out in September 1969, and Paul was born in June 1942, making him 27 at the time; but theorists argued that in some Eastern traditions, you are considered one year old at birth). The LMW? This was interpreted as an acronym for **"Linda McCartney Weeps"** (referring to his new wife) or **"Living McCartney's Waste"** (referring to his clone/replacement living out his life). The truth is that the car belonged to a man named Lotus Hartley, who lived in one of the flats across the street from the studios. After the album came out, the number plate was repeatedly stolen from his car by obsessed fans. That must have been annoying. Add it to your collection: [*Abbey Road - The Beatles*](https://amzn.to/4cNslEe?ref=artbeforenoise.com) --- ## 2\. David Bowie - Blackstar (2016) ![](https://www.artbeforenoise.com/content/images/2026/05/hidden-features-on-david-bowies-blackstar-album-cover-1.jpg) Bowie's final album, released two days before his death, was packed with deliberate secrets. If you leave the vinyl gatefold out in sunlight, the black star on the cover transforms into a starry galaxy and fades away once the light is removed. [But, wait. There's more](https://www.artbeforenoise.com/aladdin-sane-david-bowie-album-cover/). The run times on the back cover were set in a font called Terminal, which appears in a design suite called Lazarus, the name of a key Blackstar track. [Bowie](https://www.artbeforenoise.com/tag/david-bowie/) had known about his cancer diagnosis for two years. Every detail on this cover was chosen. Nothing was accidental. RIP David. Add it to your collection: [*David Bowie - Blackstar*](https://amzn.to/4sQpY9z?ref=artbeforenoise.com) --- ## 3\. The Velvet Underground - White Light/White Heat (1968) ![](https://www.artbeforenoise.com/content/images/2026/05/hidden-features-on-white-light-white-heat-album-cover-by-the-velvet-underground.jpg) At first glance the cover appears to be pure black. But look closely, very closely, and a faint skull tattoo emerges from the darkness. It belonged to actor Joe Spencer, one of Andy Warhol's discoveries, and the black-on-black design is thought to have been a Warhol idea. An entire image hiding in plain sight. You have to work hard to earn this one. Add it to your collection: [*The Velvet Underground - White Light/White Heat*](https://amzn.to/3QJjTOO?ref=artbeforenoise.com) --- ## 4\. The Beatles - Revolver (1966) ![](https://www.artbeforenoise.com/content/images/2026/05/hidden-features-on-the-beatles-revolver-album-cover.jpg) Klaus Voormann, a friend of [The Beatles](https://www.artbeforenoise.com/tag/the-beatles/) from their Hamburg days, drew the striking cover; a collage built partly from photos that appear on the back of Rubber Soul. And [Voormann](https://www.artbeforenoise.com/revolver-beatles-album-cover/) himself appears on the front cover, just underneath the drawing of John's mouth. The man who made the cover hid himself inside it. Quietly. Right there on one of the most famous sleeves in history. Add it to your collection: [*The Beatles - Revolver*](https://amzn.to/4u9uPUv?ref=artbeforenoise.com) --- ## 5\. Green Day - Dookie (1994) ![](https://www.artbeforenoise.com/content/images/2026/05/easter-eggs-on-the-dookie-album-cover-by-green-day.jpg) The cover is a sprawling, chaotic cartoon love letter to punk history, illustrated by Richie Bucher as a poop-bombing scene over Berkeley's Telegraph Avenue. Hidden within the mayhem are dozens of Easter eggs: a Fat Elvis just above the E of the album title, [Patti Smith](https://www.artbeforenoise.com/horses-patti-smith-album-cover/) from the cover of Easter far right, Angus Young shredding atop a building, and most notably, the sinister figure from Black Sabbath's iconic debut album standing ominously in the crowd. You could stare at this cover for an hour and still find something new. Let me know in the comments below what you have found. Add it to your collection: [*Green Day - Dookie*](https://amzn.to/48lkSe6?ref=artbeforenoise.com) --- ## 6\. Iron Maiden - Somewhere In Time (1988) ![](https://www.artbeforenoise.com/content/images/2026/05/easter-eggs-on-the-somewhere-in-time-album-cover-by-iron-maiden.jpg) The cover art incorporated a huge number of references to science fiction stories and movies, plus [previous Iron Maiden sleeves](https://www.artbeforenoise.com/tag/iron-maiden/). But the best detail sits in the bottom left corner; a banner hung in a shop behind the futuristic Eddie. Reverse it, and you read the message: THIS IS A VERY BORING PAINTING. In capital letters. The artist hiding his own joke inside one of metal's most detailed covers. A gutsy move? Add it to your collection: [*Iron Maiden - Somewhere In Time*](https://amzn.to/4uaT9W1?ref=artbeforenoise.com) --- ## 7\. Led Zeppelin - In Through The Out Door (1979) ![](https://www.artbeforenoise.com/content/images/2026/05/hidden-features-on-led-zeppelins-album-cover-for-in-through-the-out-door.jpg) Led Zeppelin's final album before John Bonham's death came with six different sleeves, each featuring a different angle of the same bar-room scene. The album was wrapped in brown paper so you didn't know which one you'd picked. But the real hidden detail? Apply water to the black and white inner sleeve and colours magically appeared. A cover you had to interact with to fully understand. In 1979\. Decades before anyone used the word interactive. Obviously, do this at your own risk. Don't come crying to me if you destroy your cover. Add it to your collection: [*Led Zeppelin - In Through The Out Door*](https://amzn.to/48nKMhv?ref=artbeforenoise.com) --- ## 8\. Sgt. Pepper's Lonely Hearts Club Band - The Beatles (1967) ![](https://www.artbeforenoise.com/content/images/2026/05/hidden-features-on-the-beatles-sgt-peppers-lonely-hearts-club-band-album-cover.jpg) Yes, The Beatles again. They earned it. Photographer Michael Cooper included a doll on the cover wearing a sweatshirt that read Welcome The Rolling Stones. A quiet nod to their biggest rivals, hidden in plain sight among the crowd of famous faces. While this isn't a real hidden detail, there is more to the story. [The Rolling Stones](https://www.artbeforenoise.com/tag/the-rolling-stones/) never forgot this little gem. When Cooper shot their psychedelic album Their Satanic Majesties Request later that same year, he hid the faces of all four Beatles in the flowers on the cover. A game of visual tennis, played across two of 1967's greatest sleeves. Awesome. ![](https://www.artbeforenoise.com/content/images/2026/05/the-rolling-stones-their-satanic-majestys-request-hidden-details.webp) This will be an album cover to discuss in the future. Add both to your collection: [*Sgt. Pepper's Lonely Hearts Club Band - The Beatles*](https://amzn.to/4tyLcdq?ref=artbeforenoise.com) & [*The Rolling Stones - Their Satanic Majesties Request*](https://amzn.to/4twZvPs?ref=artbeforenoise.com) --- *Got a hidden detail I missed? Hit reply and tell me about it.* ### Cool. Suave. And, Whose Feet Are Those? URL: https://www.artbeforenoise.com/inxs-kick-album-cover/ Last updated: 2026-08-30T12:04:18.000Z ![INXS band members poses in high-contrast monochrome framing the bold red Kick album logo, art directed by Nick Egan and photographed by Grant Matthews](https://www.artbeforenoise.com/content/images/2026/05/INXS-Kick-Cover-Art.png) Kick by INXS is one of my favourite albums by one of my favourite bands. Maybe it's because I'm an [Aussie](https://www.artbeforenoise.com/kylie-minogue-album-covers/) and I have to support my boys. Maybe it's because I was 13 when the album was released and at the start of my transition to becoming a teenager. A red-blooded teen boy. But this isn't about the music or my desperate desire to be cool that I want to talk about today. It never is on this blog. It's the cover. Specifically, it's Michael Hutchence, leaning against a white background, leather jacket, that hair, that look. Ladies loved him. Men wanted to be him. **I wanted to be him.** Kick came out in 1987 and Hutchence was the coolest human being on the planet. He wasn't just on the cover. He owned the cover. HE WAS THE COVER. But there was always one thing that nagged at me. Those feet on the skateboard at the top of the cover. Whose are they? ### Album Anatomy | **Album** | *Kick* | | ---------- | ----------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------- | | **Artist** | [INXS **Released**12 October 1987 **Label**WEA (Australia) **On the cover**Michael Hutchence against a white background in a leather jacket, with a skateboard, and an unidentified pair of feet at the top of the frame **Design**](https://www.artbeforenoise.com/tag/inxs/)[Nick Egan](https://www.artbeforenoise.com/tag/nick-egan/) (art direction, design, cover concept with Hutchence); photography by Grant Matthews | | **Decade** | [1980s](https://www.artbeforenoise.com/tag/1980s/) | --- ## The Man Behind the Cover The artwork for Kick was put together by British designer [Nick Egan](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nick%5FEgan?ref=artbeforenoise.com), who had previously created sleeves for The Clash, Bob Dylan and Iggy Pop. By the time INXS came calling, Egan was already a big player in the world of album cover design. But he saw something in Michael Hutchence that others hadn't yet fully recognised; a true rock star, someone with a great voice, brilliant performance skills, and the right amount of decadence and intelligence. The cover concept was developed jointly between Egan and Hutchence, with Australian fashion photographer Grant Matthews brought in to shoot it. The result was something that felt less like a rock album cover and more like a high fashion editorial. Bold. Confident. Deliberately cool. With big-lapelled leather jackets, baseball jackets and sneakers, it was after all, 1987. ![The cover of Kick by INXS. Whose feet are on the skateboard?](https://www.artbeforenoise.com/content/images/2026/05/inxs-kick-cover.jpg) --- ## The Band as a Unit Here's something that makes the cover even more interesting once you know it. Hutchence was adamant that [INXS](https://www.inxs.com/?ref=artbeforenoise.com) be presented as a band, not as a frontman and his backing group. The band apparently once [lost out on a Rolling Stone cover](https://www.nzherald.co.nz/entertainment/the-fateful-punch-that-changed-michael-hutchence-overnight/REOJWJ7HUG7YMDJQUTXKZXXWKQ/?ref=artbeforenoise.com) story because of Hutchence's insistence that the whole band be featured on the front rather than just himself. As guitarist Tim Farriss later confirmed: 'Michael said he didn't want to be on the cover without the band, and blew it out.' Somewhat ironic, considering you have to unfold the gatefold sleeve to see all six members on the cover of Kick. Anyway, there's Hutchence on the front, all cool and sexy and suave and unavoidable. And the rest of the band? Hidden inside the gatefold. A compromise that somehow pleased everyone. --- ## Those Feet Right. The skateboard. The board itself is a classic [PsychoStick skateboard](https://thedarkslide.com/products/vision-psycho-stick-modern-concave-10?ref=artbeforenoise.com) \- very much of its era, very 1987\. But whose feet are actually on it? The honest answer is that the record sleeve credits don't specifically tell us, and it has never been definitively confirmed publicly. What we do know is that the cover was a carefully styled shoot; everything on it was deliberate, chosen, considered. The skateboard wasn't an accident. It was a prop that anchored the whole image in a very specific cultural moment; street culture, youth culture, the late 80s at full tilt. My guess? Kirk Pengilly. I can see him now, riding that skateboard and playing the saxophone at the same time. Or, it was probably a crew member or stylist on the shoot. Anyway, I guess the feet are almost incidental. It's the board that matters, sitting at the top of the frame like a casual afterthought that isn't casual at all. --- ## Michael Jackson's Legs Both Kick and [Michael Jackson](https://www.artbeforenoise.com/thriller-michael-jackson-album-cover/)'s Bad were released in 1987\. Two of the biggest albums of that year, sitting on record shelves side by side. Someone, at some point, decided to place the Bad sleeve on top of Kick and noticed something remarkable. [Jackson's legs align almost perfectly with the skateboard feet on the Kick cover.](https://www.mjvibe.com/bad-with-a-kick-goes-viral/?ref=artbeforenoise.com) Nobody planned it. The two covers were shot separately, by different photographers, for different artists, on different sides of the world. It's pure coincidence. A beautiful, ridiculous, wonderful coincidence that the internet has enjoyed ever since. So, whose feet are those on the skateboard? Maybe Michael's. ![If you place Michael Jackson's Bad album above the album Kick by INXS you will get a hilarious result.](https://www.artbeforenoise.com/content/images/2026/05/michael-jackson-bad-inxs-kick-funny.webp) --- ## The Euphoria Story No piece about the Kick cover is complete without mentioning what HBO's Euphoria did to it in 2022\. In a scene from Season Two, a character queues up Never Tear Us Apart on a jukebox and eagle-eyed viewers noticed the album cover in the jukebox window wasn't quite right. [Hutchence's face had been replaced by a stock image of a bearded Danish web developer named Alexander Burchardt](https://www.rollingstone.com/tv-movies/tv-movie-features/euphoria-inxs-album-cover-remade-1322554/?ref=artbeforenoise.com), who spotted himself in the scene while watching the show with his girlfriend. HBO most likely couldn't secure a license to the original artwork, so they quietly substituted a stock image close enough to fool casual viewers. It didn't fool the fans. ![A bad cover for Kick by INXS on HBO's Euphoria](https://www.artbeforenoise.com/content/images/2026/05/the-fake-inxs-kick-cover-from-the-tv-show-euphoria.png) The Kick cover is so recognisable, so embedded in popular culture, that even a careful imitation couldn't slip past unnoticed. That's the mark of truly great album art. --- ## What Makes It Work The Kick cover succeeds because it understood exactly what INXS were becoming in 1987\. Not just a band. A cultural moment. It introduced a [high fashion sensibility](https://www.artbeforenoise.com/renaissance-beyonce-album-cover/) into rock and roll at exactly the right moment, and it did it without losing an ounce of attitude. As Egan himself has reflected, it's the influence Kick had that he is most proud of. And it's easy to see why. This wasn't just a record sleeve, it was a statement. Hutchence on that cover isn't selling you an album. He's selling you a feeling. And nearly forty years later, it still works. Even if we still don't know whose feet are on that skateboard. ### Those Lines URL: https://www.artbeforenoise.com/unknown-pleasures-joy-division-album-cover/ Last updated: 2026-08-23T07:41:31.000Z This is the first post I am going to write for Art Before Noise and I am a little apprehensive about it. I feel a little bit guilty as I start to type this. I'm going to be completely honest with you. I don't have a strong emotional connection this Joy Division's album, or their music overall. When this album was released, I was 5 years old. I cant have the same emotional connection to this album like you may or may not have. However, I get it. I know the songs. Disorder. Shadowplay. She's Lost Control. I know the reputation. I understand the legacy. But this isn't about the music. It's those lines. That series of jagged white peaks rising up and falling down against that black background. There is something about them that is magnetic in a way I couldn't explain or understand for years. They look like a heartbeat. Like mountains. Like sound itself, frozen in time. Whatever they are, they pulled me in long before I knew what I was actually looking at. And that, in a nutshell, is why I created this blog. I guess I need to thank Joy Division for the inspiration. So let's find out what those lines actually are. And who put them there. ![An iconic minimal design featuring a white, stacked line graph of radio waves from pulsar CP 1919 centered against a solid black background.](https://www.artbeforenoise.com/content/images/2026/06/Unknown-Pleasures---Joy-Division-Header.png) Unknown Pleasures - Joy Division ### Album Anatomy | **Album** | *Unknown Pleasures* | | ---------------- | ------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------ | | **Artist** | [Joy Division](https://www.artbeforenoise.com/tag/joy-division/) | | **Released** | 15 June 1979 | | **Label** | [Factory Records](https://www.artbeforenoise.com/tag/factory-records/) | | **On the cover** | A white stacked line graph, a visualisation of radio signals from pulsar CP 1919, against a solid black background | | **Design** | [Peter Saville](https://www.artbeforenoise.com/tag/peter-saville/) | | **Decade** | [1970s](https://www.artbeforenoise.com/tag/1970s/) | --- ## The Band, the Label, and a Young Designer By 1979, Joy Division were a post-punk band from Manchester with a growing reputation and a deal with Factory Records; the fiercely independent label run by the legendary Tony Wilson. They were ready to record their debut album, and they needed a cover. Factory Records had a [secret](https://www.artbeforenoise.com/album-covers-hidden-details/) weapon: a 22-year-old graphic designer named [Peter Saville](https://www.artbeforenoise.com/this-is-hardcore-pulp-album-cover/). Fresh out of Manchester Polytechnic, Saville had been designing posters for Factory's club nights and was effectively the label's in-house designer. He was young, ambitious, and had a very clear vision of what he wanted design to be. When Joy Division came to him, they didn't arrive empty handed. They brought a folder of reference material; cuttings, images, ideas. And somewhere in that folder was a page torn from *The Cambridge Encyclopedia of Astronomy*. On that page was a graph. A strange, beautiful graph of stacked lines that looked like nothing Saville had seen used on an album cover before. He knew immediately it was the one. ![This is Peter Saville who created the amazing album cover for Unknown Pleasure by Joy Division](https://www.artbeforenoise.com/content/images/2026/05/peter-saville.jpg) Peter Saville - Andrea, CC BY 2.0 [https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/2.0](https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/2.0?ref=artbeforenoise.com), via Wikimedia Commons --- ## The Lines Have a Name That graph isn't abstract art. It isn't a sound wave or a heartbeat monitor, though it's easy to see why people assume either. It is something far more extraordinary. It is a visualisation of radio signals emitted by a pulsar; specifically the first pulsar ever discovered, designated CP 1919, later renamed PSR B1919+21\. Exciting names, I know. Basically, a pulsar is a rotating neutron star, the collapsed remnant of a dead star, spinning at extraordinary speed and emitting beams of electromagnetic radiation like a cosmic lighthouse. Ah, it's getting more interesting now, huh? CP 1919 was discovered in November 1967 by a Cambridge PhD student named [Jocelyn Bell Burnell](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jocelyn%5FBell%5FBurnell?ref=artbeforenoise.com) and her supervisor Antony Hewish. The discovery of the signal was very interesting. The signal was so precise and regular, pulsing every 1.337 seconds, that the researchers initially dubbed it LGM-1\. Little Green Men. They briefly wondered if they were picking up an alien transmission. It wasn't aliens. It was a dead star, spinning in the dark, sending out signals that nobody was listening to. Until a PhD student turned those signals into a graph. And then a designer found that graph in an encyclopedia a decade later and put it on an album cover. ![The original graph that was later turned into the cover of Unknown Pleasures by Joy Division](https://www.artbeforenoise.com/content/images/2026/05/chart_showing_radio_signal_of_first_identified_pulsar.jpg) The OG: Billthom, CC BY-SA 4.0 [https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/4.0](https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/4.0?ref=artbeforenoise.com), via Wikimedia Commons --- ## Inverting the Image The original graph in the encyclopedia showed dark lines on a white background, a pretty standard scientific illustration. Saville made one crucial creative decision that transformed it entirely: he inverted it. White lines on black. Much better. That single decision changed everything. What had been a clinical scientific diagram became something mysterious, almost ominous. Something that probably belonged on a record sleeve more than a textbook. The band's instructions to Saville were simple: they wanted it white on the outside and black on the inside. Saville took that and ran with it. As he later explained, the title *Unknown Pleasures* suggested something enigmatic, something that should evoke rather than explain. The darker and more inscrutable the better. Remarkably, Peter Saville was also responsible for another quietly brilliant decision; [removing all text from the front cover](https://www.artbeforenoise.com/album-covers-no-text/) entirely. No band name. [No album title](https://www.artbeforenoise.com/yeezus-kanye-west-album-cover/). Just those lines on that black background. In 1979, that was almost unheard of. It treated the listener as someone who didn't need to be told what they were holding. --- ## The Man Who Made the Graph Here is the detail that makes this story even more extraordinary. The man who originally printed out that graph was a researcher named Harold Craft. Harold produced it as part of his own PhD work at Cornell in the late 1960s. And, he had absolutely no idea it had ended up on one of the most famous album covers in history. When he eventually found out, he went to a record shop and bought a copy. And a poster. The image drifted from a PhD thesis to a scientific journal to an astronomy encyclopedia to a folder carried into a design meeting by a post-punk band from Manchester. Nobody planned any of it. Nobody owned it in any meaningful sense. It just found its way, as the right image always seems to. --- ## An Image That Escaped the Music The cover of *Unknown Pleasures* was released on 15 June 1979\. It is, notably, the only Joy Division album released during Ian Curtis's lifetime. Curtis died in May 1980, the night before the band's first American tour. In the decades since, the image has taken on a life entirely separate from the music. It has appeared on t-shirts, trainers, babygrows and fine art prints. Raf Simons used it in a 2003 clothing collaboration with Saville. Supreme followed suit in 2006\. Disney (presumably without fully grasping the irony) put it on a [Mickey Mouse t-shirt in 2012](https://amzn.to/4ctbzLG?ref=artbeforenoise.com). Vince Staples based his 2015 album cover on it. ![The Unknown Pleasures Mickey Mouse t-shirt](https://www.artbeforenoise.com/content/images/2026/05/mickey-mouse-joy-division-unknown-pleasures.jpg) The Unknown Pleasures Mickey Mouse t-shirt In 2019, on the 40th anniversary of the album's release, astronomers revisited the original pulsar data as a tribute. Saville himself reworked the design for a climate emergency campaign, flattening the lines into silence; the sound of a dead planet. The cover now lives in the permanent collection at [MoMA in New York](https://www.moma.org/collection/works/186051?artist%5Fid=47019&page=1&sov%5Freferrer=artist&ref=artbeforenoise.com). A lithograph. 12 by 12 inches. --- ## What The Lines Actually Mean Here is the thing about those lines. Now that you know that they are radio pulses from a dead star, discovered by a PhD student, printed by a researcher who had no idea what he'd set in motion, inverted by a 22-year-old designer who just knew it was right; do they look different to you? They do to me. There is something almost unbearably poetic about it. A rotating neutron star, sending out signals in the dark. Faithful, precise, unheard for centuries until someone pointed a radio telescope at the right patch of sky. A cosmic heartbeat that nobody was listening to. Put it on an album called *Unknown Pleasures* and suddenly it means everything. That's what a great album cover does. It doesn't illustrate the music. It doesn't explain it. It adds another layer of meaning that the music alone couldn't carry. It makes you feel something before you've heard a single note. Those lines. Those lines dragged me in.