2024 was a year where the most memorable and controversial album cover – one that’s probably already sprung to mind, but in any case, BRAT – was also purposefully ugly. (Spoiler alert: it’s on here.) But there was no shortage of striking cover artworks this year, ranging from intricately beautiful to delicate to surreal, simple or grueling to make. In highlighting the 50 album covers that stood out to us the most this year, we’ve once again reached out to many of the artists featured for insights into their creative process. This is an unranked list following a kind of aesthetic or conceptual logic, but we’ve placed the 10 artworks that left the strongest impression at the top.

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Cindy Lee, Diamond Jubilee

Diamond Jubilee may be the seventh full-length by Cindy Lee, the project of Canadian singer-songwriter Patrick Flegel, but given the mountainous acclaim it received, it served as an entry point for many fans. The cover art also offers a visual introduction to Flegel’s onstage persona via a cartoon drawing, which is superimposed on a photo of the Alberta Terminals Limited grain elevator in Lethbridge, Alberta, the Canadian province where Flegel was born. The industrial building was built in 1931, and I could make some point about how the visual aesthetic matches the nostalgic influences of its retro-pop, but it’s also just an image that’s intimately tied to the music: every time one of its entrancing melodies creeps into my mind, the cover does, too.

Bat for Lashes, The Dream of Delphi

From 2009’s Two Suns to 2019’s Lost Girls, Bat for Lashes always matches her phantasmagoric songs with striking artwork. The same is true for Natasha Khan’s latest LP, The Dream of Delphi, whose artwork depicts her on a cliffside with hands stretched up towards the sky. The ocean tides – wild and vast – seem to control the entire scene. Shot by Michal Pudelka, with creative direction by Alexandra Green, the image ties into the album’s accompanying film, The Dream of Delphi: A New Transmission, which portrays Khan’s journey of motherhood with both raw humanity and mythical imagination. It’s as spellbinding as the songs themselves. “Natasha has been such an inspiration of mine since her very first incredible album, when I was just getting ready to study photography,” Pudelka wrote on Instagram. “Her music was always there for me, helping me navigate through bumpy times. She is truly a one of a kind artist and I couldn’t be more humbled to be part of this and create a series of imagery for this hauntingly dreamy project.

Brittany Howard, What Now

If the cover art of What Now strikes you as vibrant and surrealist, you already have a pretty solid idea of what Brittany Howard’s latest album sounds like. Many of the best album covers feature artists laying in a field of flowers, but this one, captured by Bobbi Rich, finds Howard perfectly at ease, wearing white sunglasses and a psychedelic dress that almost merges into the earth. “You’re fucking up my energy/ I told the truth so set me free,” she growls on the title track, and all that energy’s bottled into the cover.

Bnny, One Million Love Songs

The cover for One Million Love Songs was taken by Alexa Viscius, twin sister of Chicago singer-songwriter Jessica Viscius and bassist in her band, Bnny. Shot while were backpacking in Alaska, the photo shows Viscius laying on a field over a backdrop of snowy mountains, its brightness immediately contrasting her debut album, 2021’s Everything. “We woke up that morning, and nobody was around for miles,” Alexa explained over email. “Jessica asked if we could take some nude photos, and of course, I said yes. I had a point-and-shoot camera, so I snapped a roll of photos before we had breakfast. When we got home, and I developed the film, I saw this shot, cropped it into a square, and sent it to Jessica. I was like, ‘This has to be our next album cover.’”

Hannah Frances, Keeper of the Shepherd

On Keeper of the Shepherd, Hannah Frances digs through buried emotion, but the record also frames grief as a long process of surrender – a “self-burial,” as the singer-songwriter puts it. ‘Bronwyn’ opens the album with cathartic devotion and vulnerability, and it was during the filming of its music video that Grant Hindsley captured the cover photo. Frances and her team had been out on Washington’s Olympic Peninsula in January 2023, exploring the forest for a few days. “This particular moment was from a one-take scene cut at the climax of the song, as I entered an open pit of dirt and ash from a burned clearing and fell to my knees,” Frances explained to Our Culture. “The concept was a prayerful self-burial, as this song encapsulates my experience of surrendering into the transformative and harrowing process of grief. This photo encapsulates the entire record to me, which is a journey of loss, self-reclamation, release, and rebirth. Kneeling and surrendering the weight of my body to the ground was a profound and prayerful experience, and I feel this photograph offers an invitation into the intensity and complexity of the album.”

Maruja, Connla’s Well

The cover art for Maruja’s Connla’s Well EP, an exhilarating fusion of post-punk and jazz rock, is a photograph taken on Strandhill Beach, Ireland in the mid 1970s by Frank Carroll, sax player Joe’s grandfather. “The boy in the foreground is Joe’s Father Anthony Carroll whose birthday party it was in the photo,” the band told us. “The EP lyrically touches on themes of mental health issues, feelings of anxiety and isolation whilst striving for deep connection which we felt the photograph reflected perfectly.” They added, “The last track ‘Resisting Resistance’ is an instrumental piece spawned from an improvised session on 19th June 2021, 5 days before the passing of Joe’s father Antony Carroll.”

ganavya, like the sky I’ve been too quiet

Blending spiritual jazz, electronica, and experimental north Indian classical music, like the sky i’ve been too quiet is New York-born, Tamil Nadu-raised singer and multi-instrumentalist ganavya’s debut on Shabaka Hutchings’ Native Rebel label. The album’s cover artwork translates the deeply spiritual, even transcendental, nature of the music into what Romain Rolland, in a letter to Sigmund Freud, described as an “oceanic feeling.” It is evocative and swirling, as ganavya’s dance – not unlike Bat for Lashes’ The Dream of Delphi – mirrors that of her mesmerizing voice.

Katy Kirby, Blue Raspberry

Blue Raspberry’s cover photo features Katy Kirby with Pearl Amanda Dickson, one-half of fellow Artist Spotlight alumni Sex Week. “I wanted art that would immediately and unambiguously convey some core themes of the album—romantic, coastal/beachy, and also gay :),” Kirby said over email. “My initial plan for art had fallen through literally the night before, so were sort of improvising. I’m so glad it did though, I love how Pearl’s hair looks on the cover, and it was fun to incorporate that light green color throughout other elements of the album package. I think I’ll always personally love the album art for Blue Raspberry because I’ll always associate it with a really nice day—I asked my friend Pearl Dickinson to pose with me at the very last minute, and she very generously agreed to help—she even drove us all out to a remote lakeside location in her little car. We stopped to pick up some truly decadent picnic supplies on our way out of town too. It was a chill, lovely day of hanging out topless with Pearl, Lane Rodges (who helped direct most of the art for Blue Raspberry), and Tonje Thielsen, one of my favorite photographers alive.”

Sam Lee, songdreaming

Reimagining traditional folk songs, Sam Lee’s mystical, evocative songdreaming was born from the singer-songwriter’s affinity for natural landscapes and laments our treatment of them. In a statement about the album’s artwork, he reflected, “British chalk streams are the ecological jewel of our country. Wonderpaths of history. Places of reverie and ancestors. Conceived with photographer Dom Tyler we crafted, using multiple long exposures and LED lights, the idea of how songs channel through us reaching, touching, transmitting. How does one capture the spirit of land and a very English Dreamtime sense of land conversation. This is the album’s premise… moments of enchantment and connection.”

Knocked Loose, You Won’t Go Until You’re Supposed To

The artwork for Knocked Loose’s You Won’t Go Until You’re Supposed To was captured by Briscoe Park, who specializes in images of desolate spaces and abandoned structures. Given the album’s relentless hardcore intensity, you’d expect the presence of the crucifix to serve as a typical subversion of religion, but it’s more ambiguous. “I didn’t want this to be an anti-religion album, but it is imagery everyone can associate with,” vocalist Bryan Garris told Rock Sound. “It is massively intertwined with everyday life. It’s a symbol of something following or towering over you. Of something that you’re dealing with. An overwhelming presence. The image has an isolating, lonely, desolate feel to it. But at the same time, the warm greens and the setting around it reminded me of home. It looks like it could be in my mom’s backyard. It’s a very familiar setting for me and the band, and it has a very overwhelming feeling because of that.”

Sour Widows, Revival of a Friend

Ben Styer created the painting used as the cover art for cover Sour Widows’ debut album, and it’s also the record’s namesake. The band was drawn to the magical realism in Styer’s paintings, in part because at the heart of Revival is a Friend are the “magical experiences that come along with grieving and losing someone,” as Susanna Thomson explained in our Artist Spotlight interview. Over email, Maia Sinaiko added: “We found his art years ago and he became one of our favorite painters. Styer licensed use of two of his other paintings for singles we released in 2022, and we wanted to maintain a continuity between those songs and the rest of the songs on the album. The painting is surreal and mythical with a dark, Renaissance quality; we felt it resonated deeply with the content of the album, which is so much about the cycle of life and death, and the magical properties of time and memory. The vinyl design was done by Mac Pogue. We wanted it to look like an old, worn edition of Beowulf or The Hobbit, some legendary tale. Both the painting and the additional design elements perfectly communicated our feelings about the songs on Revival Of A Friend. It’s an epic journey: beautiful, mysterious and a little scary, but full of love.”

Les Savy Fav, OUI, LSF

Les Savy Fav frontman Tim Harrington grew the cover art for OUI, LSF in his Brooklyn attic, which is also where the band recorded most of their first LP in 14 years. “The year-long process had been extremely organic and connected to this little room in my home where we were writing,” he wrote in a statement. “For many years, the guys and I lived in weird art spaces where the priority was 100% creativity and 0% practicality. For example, while writing our first three records, our home base was an old men’s club/wedding hall we moved into. The defining feature was a large, freestanding rehearsal room. Pat Mahoney, our original drummer, now in LCD, was very handy, and James Murphy, also LCD, convinced us to make it diamond-shaped to ‘sound better’. The bigger impact was that all the bedrooms had to be built at crazy angles – it was like a Morrocan Bazaar. Anyway, now we’re a lot more domesticated and live in low-key, comfortable spaces with our families, but this unexpected space in the attic of my conventional apartment is the embodiment of a space in my brain. The record reflects that.”

“So, that’s the physical context—a chaotic bubble in a world of orderly hedges, so to speak,” Harrington continued. “I wanted to capture some of that dynamic visually. Art/life is less something we make and more something we nudge. Plants are partners with their own wills and ways. You can influence them, but ultimately, they do what they want. When we were recording Go Fourth with Phil Ek, I coined the portmanteau ‘shovevolving,’ which is kind of the same idea.”

The album’s back cover, Harrington noted, shows the actual soil and roots, “which grew into this intense web of black-metal-looking type. Paradox is the core theme of the record for me. A big part of my time after Root For Ruin was spent getting diagnosed with and learning to manage bipolar disorder. Learning to square these two sides of myself in one life was pretty rough. Beyond the grass/dirt, most of the songs fit in diads: ‘Guzzle Blood’, the opener, and ‘World Got Great’ are the thesis. But ‘Legendary Tippers’ goes with ‘Nihilists’, ‘Don’t Mind Me’ goes with ‘What We Don’t Don’t Want’, etc. So, yeah, grass and roots—one ordered and reaching to the sun, one chaotically twisting through the dirt. They seem like opposites, but really, they’re different aspects of one living, independent organism.”

Bill Ryder-Jones, Iechyd Da

Even in its most melancholy moments, Bill Ryder-Jones’ fifth solo album exudes a comforting warmth. It was the same quality that drew the singer-songwriter to the painting, by Dale Bissland, that graces Iechyd Da’s cover. “I first discovered Dale’s stunning work whilst aimlessly scrolling through Instagram, when I clicked the picture and had a nose at the rest of Dale’s work it was Texture and Light Crail that jumped out at me,” Ryder-Jones told us. “The pink house at the centre of the painting seemed warm and safe to me. I’m rarely moved by visual art past ‘wow that took talent’ so it was quite a trip to be moved so much. In truth all of Dale’s work touches me, I’m unsure why. I certainly take comfort from his use of colours, everything feels slightly more numb than the painful vivid bright of real life. Having deciding that I wanted to use his work and after Domino had dotted the i’s it became more obvious that what I was looking for was a warm safe space to house this particular record.”

BIG|BRAVE, A Chaos of Flowers

Like its predecessor, nature morte, which made last year’s best album covers list, the art and layout for BIG|BRAVE’s A Chaos of Flowers is credited to guitarist Mathieu Bernard Ball. “My approach to creating the artwork for this record diverged slightly from my usual method,” he explained. “While I typically begin each project with a completely fresh perspective, this time I adopted a process more akin to our approach to music composition. For each new album, we strive to start with a clean slate, but inevitably, there are ideas—ideas that were never fully realized—that resurface. The act of revisiting these fragments, these half-formed concepts, is an integral part of our creative evolution. Everything we’ve done thus far informs what comes next.”

Ball added: With Chaos of Flowers—written so soon after Nature Morte—we made a conscious decision to consider both albums as companion pieces. This sensibility extended to the visual aspect as well. For the cover art, I took the sculpture I had created and photographed for Nature Morte and reimagined it. I added to it, subtracted from it, and distorted it, striving to create something both new and familiar. The intention was not to replicate, but to depart from the original while maintaining a thematic continuity. In this way, both the music and the visual elements of the album forge a deliberate, cohesive connection to our previous body of work.”

Crumb, AMAMA

In our interview with Crumb’s Lila Ramani around the release of the band’s latest LP, AMAMA, the singer brought up Afghan war rugs a key inspiration behind the album cover, created by Abraham Mohamed El Makawy and Kalle Wadzinski. “Abe, my partner who is also our creative director, introduced me to those rugs,” she said. “We’re big fans of that style – we actually have one. These beautiful hand-knotted rugs, I think a lot of time are made by refugees. They use this pictorial, cartoony style to depict the conflicts in that area; it’s this bizarre cultural mashup telling a story on a rug. I had the idea maybe that could be the album art, and Abe ran with it, basically telling the story of the album through symbols and drawings. He drew this thing and then worked with [Kalle Wadzinski] to generate the carpet. But yeah, the upper half of it corresponds to a song, and the goose mouth references one of the songs, different lyrical things all scattered together.”

Julia Holter, Something in the Room She Moves

As childhood friends in the ‘90s, Los Angeles-based composer Julia Holter and artist Christina Quarles would spend countless hours drawing and listening to vinyl. For the cover of Something in the Room She Moves, which depicts two human-like figures entwined with one another, Holter chose a painting by Quarles called Wrestling. “Christina’s work often has these figures in it that are so complex and layered and amazing,” she told Under the Radar. “It’s unclear what they’re doing. Like, is it sexual? Is it kind of violent…. or maybe both? It really felt right to me. There’s so many layers to her work. I think that’s what I love about it. It’s… complicated.” Holter’s avant-pop music, of course, evokes a similar sense of ambiguity and complexity – it’s intimately fluid and slippery, like the characters that waft through it.

Helado Negro, PHASOR

The cover art for Helado Negro’s Phasor isn’t one of those images that directly match or reference some element of the music. With Crystal Zapata handling the design and layout of Kristi Sword’s drawings, the cover does, however, uniquely capture the effect of this collection of songs, which playfully ripple and spiral into each other, leaving plenty of space to pay attention to each element that bubbles up. The textures are delicate and diaphanous, and though the cover may lack the human quality of the music, there’s great intimacy in just the fact that Roberto Carlos Lange recorded Phasor across the hall from the studio where Sword, his wife and frequent collaborator, created the illustrations.

Hiatus Kaiyote, Love Heart Cheat Code

Since revealing she had been diagnosed with cancer in 2018, Hiatus Kaiyote’s Nai Palm has publicly spoken against the beauty standards that can push women post-mastectomy to opt for superficial surgery. The painter and sculptor Rajni Perrera’s work, which is featured on the cover of the band’s latest album, helped her put that belief into practice. “I found the illustrious work of Rajni Perrera years ago and hit her up to ask permission to tattoo some of her work,” she explained. “It was for my mastectomy scar which was super important for me to challenge beauty standards, and I wanted imagery that was both powerful but effeminate. The art for Love Heart Cheat Code was a piece of hers that already existed and was to be the final piece in my tattoo, but ended being right for the album. It was sentimental to close that chapter of my life with this record and imagery. I love that the line work has strong design elements and the blue took many attempts with me working directly with the layout designer finding the right Pantone. I subsequently learnt A LOT about blue and how light affects how we perceive colour. The artwork is simple yet refined, and totally striking.”

Ariana Grande, eternal sunshine

Ariana Grande introduced her eternal sunshine era with a blurry press photo of the left side of her face, shot by Katia Temkin, who joined the singer’s creative team after first working with her for 2018’s ‘thank you, next’. Almost all of the seven covers she shot incorporate some form of vivid red – bold lipstick, red gloves – but the main digital cover is perhaps the subtlest, showing the back of Grande’s neck, her blonde hair styled in a ponytail and resting on another’s shoulder. Grande has revealed this other is in fact a clone of herself, tying into the album’s dual themes of intimacy and introspection.

Fabiana Palladino, Fabiana Palladino

“I made this album mainly at night-time and lot of the work on it was done in isolation,” Fabiana Palladino said of her self-titled debut LP, one of the best pop records of the year, in a statement to Our Culture. “When it came to imagining how the artwork might look, I knew I wanted to inhabit a kind of persona – a version of myself that I was exploring in the songs. There were some references from cinema and fashion that I looked at that represented this, characters played in noir movies by actors like Greta Garbo & Veronica Lake, and certain images came to mind too – YSL’s ‘Le Smoking’, shot by Helmut Newton, for example. I knew I wanted the album cover to be a photo, and for me to feel I could live in this solitary, mysterious and strong role in all of the album visuals as well as in the songs.”

“Texas Maragh, who art directed and designed all of the artwork for my album campaign, and I developed this into an extensive mood board, with Texas adding lots more references as well as other ideas and graphics that helped flesh out the overall vision,” Palladino continued. “Texas came across Nicola Delorme and we both absolutely loved his work, lots of his images were on our mood board but we had no idea if he’d be interested in shooting the artwork. Luckily, he was and brought an incredible vision of his own. We shot the artwork in Paris with his team.”

Fabiana Palladino displays a deep investment in pop’s history as much as it slinks beyond nostalgia. “All of the photos were shot on Polaroid which I love because it links to my production approach for the music on the album, which was to take inspiration from the past, my influences, & the music I love that might feel somewhat nostalgic, but allow enough modernity into it that it still feels authentic and relevant,” she explained. “I feel like there was a mirroring in Nicola’s approach, with him shooting on an analog format, but still using modern techniques and approaches as well. The photo I chose for the album cover felt like the most powerful image to me and the boldest statement. At the same time there’s still some mystery in it, and it feels quite elusive in some ways. All of the photos and Texas’s design choices represented the music and me as an artist perfectly.”

NewDad, Madra

The cover for NewDad’s Madra is a photo of a broken porcelain doll sullenly looking down. “Madra – meaning dog in Irish – explores various difficult parts of the human condition and the idea of the title is that these feelings that come up are sometimes ones you can’t escape, feelings that follow you around like a dog,” singer-guitarist Julie Dawson explained in a statement, and the cover photo specifically homes in on feelings of fragility and vulnerability. It actually went viral in China, with many fans sharing their interpretations of the artwork on social media. “We woke up this morning to find our album cover (photo by
Joshua Gordon) going viral in China. so so surreal to see so many people creating their own interpretations 🥲,” the band tweeted. Producer Bloodz Boi also shared a photo of him telling Gordon the news, and he called it “one of the strangest and most special things that’s ever happened to me.”

Allie X, Girl With No Face

Shot by Marcus Cooper, the cover art for Allie X’s third studio album features a mask of her face she’d commissioned by Miya Turnbull. “Though Girl With No Face didn’t become the title of this album till the very end of the process, for years before that I knew I wanted to feature masks in the creative direction,” the Canadian singer-songwriter told us. “When I went to shoot with Marcus, I brought along the masks I had commissioned by both Miya as well as another incredible artist, Shalva Nikvashvili and we incorporated them into our shoot.” Allie noted that whener she does an album cover shoot, she never knows exactly when they have the right shot. “I just make sure we get a lot of different looks and trust that the cover will reveal itself. It’s always worked out shooting that way, and this time was no exception. I am very proud of this cover and feel that it pretty perfectly captures the essence of the record, as well as the collaboration of many talented artists.”

Frances Chang, Psychedelic Anxiety

Franches Chang’s vision for the cover of her beautifully textured new album, Psychedelic Anxiety, was clear and spontaneous. “I saw myself at my messy desk, in my bedroom (where I recorded most of the album), surrounded by a sort of unholy mess, with the image doubled in the mirror,” the Brooklyn songwriter explained. “I had this urge to document the actual mess of my room at the time. I commissioned my good friend Rosie Lopeman to paint it, because I love her work and her use of color. She came over and snapped some reference photos to make sure the composition was what I had in mind. (I loved the rawness and weirdness of the photo that she took so much that I put it on the back cover of the album). Then I arranged a still life of symbolic objects around my desk.” Chang added, “I think the concept of this album art is similar to a Vanitas – a still life painting that depicts a cluttered arrangement of ‘symbolic objects to convey the fleeting nature of life, the futility of earthly pleasures, and the inevitability of death.’ This is really resonant with the themes of the album, even if I was not previously aware of this trend in 17th century Dutch art history.”

Capstan, The Mosaic

Capstan enlisted Ylenia Rom to craft the striking mosaic that adorns the cover of the post-hardcore band’s aptly titled double album. Speaking about the process behind the album art in an itnerview with Heaviest of Art, Capstan said: “The first thing we did was compose a short list of physical items or imagery that she could use that either directly represent or allude to the lyrics and themes of the record itself. Aside from that small guideline, we let her take the lead on everything else, and Ylenia created a breathtaking piece of art that I am so proud to say is the cover of a Capstan record.” Rom added, “The elements that had to fit visually are indeed numerous, but each has a deep and symbolic meaning linked to the lyrics. Passion, courage, and determination had to emerge. Nothing is ever random. We found broken glass, shards, flowers, bones created with sanded recycled wood found on the seashore, and butterflies.”

BABii, DareDeviil2000

BABii’s musical world-building is always matched by her visuals. The producer and singer-songwriter’s latest, DareDeviil2000, is billed as her “tribute to the demonized, a celebration of survival – and my sympathy for the devil.” Commenting on the artwork, she told us: “The concept for the cover is rooted in my childhood connection to villainous characters. It reflects my sense of comfort within such a contrasting, unconventional environment. The design was heavily inspired by an illustration by Japanese video game artist Jun Sumi, created for the game Wizardry. It depicts a young innocent girl surrounded by demons, but she is so at ease. I vividly remember the first time I saw it – something about it resonated deeply with me and stayed on my mind ever since, so it felt only fitting to put my own spin on it, with the help of my talented friends, Reece Owen Sweeny and Luca Wowczyna.”

Erika de Casier, Still

On the cover of Still, Erika de Casier is wearing a black leather trench coat and bug-eye sunglasses, offering a window into her organic yet surrealist world of dreams and desire. Talking to Vogue, the Copenhagen producer and singer-songwriter explained that she and photographer Colin Solal Cardo shot the cover by having him pretend to be a paparazzo. “I really wanted it to feel natural, and most of the clothes that I’m wearing in all the press shots are from my closet. I wanted it to be very me,” she said, adding, “I feel like there’s this chaos and I’m standing completely still within it, and very firm. I really liked how that felt.”

Kali Uchis,Orquideas

On the cover artwork for Orquideas, photographed by Daniel Sannwald (known for shooting the covers for Rosalía’s Motomami and SZA’s SOS), Kali Uchis’ nude body is pressed against a glass wall, her breasts covered by two orchids; the album is named after the national flower of Columbia, the cattleya trianae orchid. Sannwald, who also directed the music videos for Uchis’ ‘Fue Mejor’ and ‘Nuestro Planeta’, enlisted artist and designer Mat Maitland to help bring a surrealistic edge to the image. “The artwork is so important that it feels like an extra track on the album,” Maitland told Rolling Stone. “It’s part of the world, and you can’t really pull it apart. You’ll always think of the imagery when you’re listening to it.” Maitland added, “I wanted the orchid to be this otherworldly, oversized fantasy landscape. There’s nothing else there: just a world of orchids, and Kali is in that world.”

Tierra Whack, World Wide Whack

To bring the dark yet playfully surreal world of Tierra Whack’s debut full-length and its fictional character to life, the rapper and singer worked with conceptual artist Alex Da Corte, with whom she first collaborated on the video for 2021’s ‘Dora’. “After listening to her album, I wanted to create a world where Tierra could exist as this Whack persona,” Da Corte told Wallpaper, “one who is both from the future or not of this world and one who is deeply rooted in her city and to her family. We share a similar colour sensibility and sense of humour, so it felt quite natural to dream and be dreamy when diving into the Wide World of Whack.” Whack added, “Alex is a visionary and an extremely talented individual. With him being Philly based it was just a natural connection.”

The Cure, Songs of a Lost World

Like basically every music critic on the planet (myself included), Andy Vella, graphic designer and the band’s longtime collaborator, agrees that Songs of a Lost World finds them “at their classic best.” Unlike any music critic — or graphic designer, for that matter, having worked with the band for over four decades — Vella can “start to visualise and create imagery without even hearing the music,” he explained in an interview with Creative Review. Just after hearing some of the new songs during the band’s 2022 tour, he designed the custom ‘Cureation’ lettering that’s used for the logo on the cover.

When Robert Smith mentioned a 1975 sculpture by Slovenian artist Janez Pirnat titled Bagatelle, Vella pictured it as “floating in space, almost as a distant relic from a forgotten time; a buoyant force resisting any kind of gravity.” He added, “The moving thing about this album cover is that it embodies a darkness that the band have always had; yet it’s moved into a different look with the cover almost illustrating and embodying the sound and emotions of the album, which has definitely resonated hugely with people who’ve heard it,”

Infant Island, Obsidian Wreath

Both the music of Obsidian Wreath and its artwork are informed by the landscape of rural Virginia, specifically Fredericksburg, where the band members of Infant Island are from. The blackened screamo outfit worked with Virginian folk artist and longtime collaborator Sarah Bachman to capture the “social rootedness” of their Southern home, “contrasting the ethereality of an Appalachian night with the chaotic obliterating power of a wildfire,” according to press materials. “Silhouetted figures, between ash and shadow, are imprinted on the ground, absently present, ghosts which cling to the land and to each other.” In an interview with chorus.fm, the band elaborated: “Fredericksburg is where everybody ends up, but you go further, you get closer to that nature, which is what Sarah captures so well. And she’s very also into  occult and Appalachian witchery and stuff and bringing those influences in is I think something that we all wanted as part of the aesthetic and ethos of the record.”

Goat Girl, Below the Waste

Riding through a world of shadows and light is an overriding theme on Goat Girl’s Below the Waste and its accompanying imagery, particularly the album cover, which centers on a car that’s succumbed to a monstrous yet vibrant realm of glaring creatures. “Having access to the earliest demos we were able to witness the sound of Below the Waste grow from its initial inceptions to its dark and grandiose conclusion,” designers Toby Evans-Jesra and the Snailman, who also collaborated on the band’s 2021 LP On All Fours, said in a statement to Our Culture. “We worked closely with the band sharing ideas and influences referencing different artists, films and music that gradually merged the imagery and sonics creating a feedback loop of inspiration. The imagery came to us quickly and vividly – ruin and rot,  submersion and undergrowth – a shadowy contrast to the garish technicolour in our previous painting for On All Fours. Making use of light and shadow- the seen and unseen- we hoped to capture the darkness as well as the glimmers of hope which permeate the album.”

Kehlani, CRASH

The team behind Kehlani’s CRASH drew inspiration from iconic glam album covers from the early 2000s, particularly those by Mariah Carey, while seeking to elevate their typically minimal aesthetic. “Kehlani brought forward a historical image from the late 1940s that beautifully captured what the CRASH cover could embody,” photographer Israel Riqueros told Our Culture. “Combining this with elements of beauty, glam, and a setting that reflects the world of CRASH became our mission—and I’m incredibly proud of the result.”

”Conceptualizing the angle was a challenge, as my creative process often involves adding layers of detail to a frame,” Riqueros added. “Initially, there were sketches and versions of the cover with far more intricate details. However, Kehlani introduced me to the idea of stripping it back to create something minimalistic yet iconic, which shifted my perspective entirely. The moment we captured the shot felt undeniable. It happened spontaneously on set, as we both locked in and decided, ‘Let’s stay behind and get this one.’ And that’s exactly what we did.”

Billie Eilish, Hit Me Hard and Soft

On the cover of her third album, Billie Eilish is submerged in the deep blue sea, looking up at the open door she might have fallen through. It mirrors the haunted, suffocating intimacy of Hit Me Hard and Soft, and the singer described the grueling process behind the shot in an interview with Stephen Colbert. “This was the day after this last Grammys, actually,” Eilish recalled. I had gone to sleep at 7 a.m. I woke up, I dyed my hair black — it was like bright red — I dyed it black that day. Then I went to this random place in Santa Clarita or some nonsense. There’s a tank in this giant place, and it was, like, 10 feet deep. And I popped my little ass in there, and I was in there for six hours.” During the shoot, Eilish was weighted down and fully clothed, keeping her eyes open. “A lot of my inspirations for the visuals on this album were optical illusion-type things,” she added. “Things that just make you question it or think about it for longer.”

Porridge Radio, Clouds in the Sky They Will Always Be There for Me

With frontperson Dana Margolin having painted and drawn Porridge Radio’s previous album covers, there’s always been a distinct visual identity to the band’s work. The cover of their latest LP, though, is a photograph of Margolin looking at a sculpture of a swallow that she made while writing the songs, which was also one of its lyrical inspirations. Though Margolin had also been doing lyric paintings reflecting the songs in different stages, she thought the cover should be a photo of the swallow sculpture, which was inspired by Alexander Calder’s mobiles and sculptures.

“A friend sent me the work of about 20 photographers,” Margolin told Billboard. “I saw Steve Gullick’s work, and I thought he could capture this image that I had in my head. Luckily, he followed us on Instagram. I sent him a message that just said would you be interested in doing this. He said, ‘Yeah, let’s have a phone call.’ I described it to him and did a sketch of the album cover and showed it to him. Then we spent a whole day in my art studio playing around with the swallow. My sister was there as well giving movement direction. He managed to capture the image that I had in my head. He really brought it to life. I love this picture.”

Cassandra Jenkins, My Light, My Destroyer

The cover art for Cassandra Jenkins’ My Light, My Destroyer feels instantly alligned with that of her previous album, An Overview on Phenomenal Nature, if only for the vastness of the sky that seems to colour the entire frame. This time, it’s a deeper purple, and Jenkins is standing right at the center. Shot by Wyndham Garnett on location in the Mojave Desert, with help from Francis Cardinale, a significant shift from the cover of An Overview, which was taken from Norwegian photographer Ole Brodersen’s ‘Trespassing’ series featuring an LED light featuring moving with the motion of a kite. Given the album’s cosmic and celestial musings, a more predictable cover would have her staring up at the night sky, or in the middle of a planetarium. But it’s Jenkins’ actual presence that holds the weight of the photograph, lifting some kind of veil, letting us into her unique worldview.

Oren Ambarchi, Johan Berthling, and Andreas Werliin, Ghosted II

Ghosted II, the sequel to Oren Ambarchi, Johan Berthling, and Andreas Werliin’s 2022 record, sees the band continuing their fascinating journey through deep groove and atmosphere. It’s also their second collaboration with illustrator and photographer Pål Dybwik, whom Berthling met at a concert in Oslo. “I saw his basket baller-photo (for the first album) and felt right away that this could be an interesting match with the music of Ghosted,” the Swedish musician explained. “To me it’s dreamlike qualities worked great with/against the repetitive focus we have in the music with that group. Pål told me it was very much taken by luck with a phone camera, so he was unsure if the quality would work out, but it went fine. For the second album we asked Pål again and he found a new angle with this weird statue image from Oslo by night that also worked perfectly with the music, but in another way.” The group will soon be recording their third LP, and Berthling said that Dybwik will certainly be involved.

“First when I had the physical album in the house I noticed the connections with the repetitiveness in the music and the basket-ballers repeated attempts to hit the basket,” Dybwik added. “Atmosphere and rhythm, repetition. Darkness, but not sadness. The beauty in the dark landscape, empty of people. I try to find an atmosphere of sorts in my images. The town that otherwise is full of people, the rush and bustle that disappears just after the onset of darkness.”

Vemod, The Deepening

Matching the atmospheric grandeur of Vemod’s atmospheric black metal, the striking cover artwork for The Deepening was made by Ørnulf Opdahl. “I have a special relationship with his work, as I grew up with his paintings on the wall of my childhood home, and while recording The Deepening,” Jan Even, who founded the group at the turn of the millennium in his native Naomis, said on Instagram. “I gathered the courage to write him a letter, asking if it would be at all possible for us to use his work for our forthcoming album. He graciously gave his blessing very soon after, and from that point on, with a renewed sense of direction, the vision for this work began to truly come to life.”

Pyur, Lucid Anarchy

German artist Sophie Schnell, who records as Pyur, laid down Lucid Anarchy between Berlin, a tiny fishing village in Bretagne, the Jura mountains, and a Tyrolean alpine village. It was in these vivid natural environments that she found inspiration for the cover art of her second full-length on Subtext. “In the beginning phase of composing Lucid Anarchy while traveling in an old military bus along the coast of France, I went for a birthday walk on the beach towards the Dune du Pilat, the biggest shifting dune in Europe,” Schnell explained. “On the sand slopes by the water I came across natural drawings reminding me of feathers and rivers, created by the disrupted tides in the basin, gravity and the wind. I captured them with my phone, knowing they’d likely be gone the next day. Back in Berlin upon completion of the album, I rediscovered these images and chose one which reminded me of a Jupiter mountain top or some sort of ecomorphic entity. My camera resolution was low, so I traced the lines by hand on my iPad and experimented with the coloring and blurring, which somehow altered the perception of it’s scale. At last subtle AI upsampling helped highlighting the details and patterns. I like that the artwork was a co-creation with nature, it feels very complementary to the narrative and aesthetic of the music. Also, on the bottom one can vaguely see the paw traces of the dog that walked with me that day.”

Coldplay, Moon Music 

Pictured on the cover of Moon Music is a moonbow, also known as a lunar rainbow, a rare optical phenomenon in which a rainbow is produced by moonlight rather than direct sunlight, resulting from the refraction of light through water droplets in the air. If what you just read sounds very Coldplay-ish, the actual image also warms you to the sound of the album — typically lush but more atmospheric than usual. It was taken in 2020 by Argentinian photographer Matias Alonso Revelli using a Nikon D3100, and Coldplay’s team reached out to him via email to ask permission to use the photo. “During the pandemic I was at home when my dad called to tell me I should go to the backyard and look to the sky,” Revelli wrote on Instagram. “What I saw was this wonderful rainbow right above my head, I rushed to get my camera, took a couple of pictures, went inside to edit them as I usually do and that was it.”

Grandaddy, Blu Wav

There’s a deeply human, pillowy warmth to the music of Grandaddy’s Blu Wav, but its lush, nocturnal arrangements simultaneously sound beamed from outer space. Speaking about the cover art, Jason Lyle wrote in an email: “I had the idea of a High Plains Drifter-like character in space. I went on eBay and bought a box of vintage astronomy magazines knowing there would be lots of photos of galaxies in them. I cut up a few dozen swatches of the ones I liked best and arranged them in a way that looked good to me. The drifter on his tired horse is something I had laying around for years that I was glad to be able to finally use.” He added, “I settled on a font for the title which is no small feat these days… given the hundreds of options that pop up when you Google ‘sci-fi font.’ Finally I slapped on the Grandaddy logo and then decided to enlarge the album title because it looked better that way. Pretty high concept stuff.”

10. The Smile, Wall of Eyes

Thom Yorke and Stanley Donwood have a longstanding collaborative relationship, but the series that produced the Wall of Eyes artwork was the first time they worked so closely together. Exhibited as part two of ‘The Crow Flies’, which began as cover artwork for 2022’s A Light for Attracting Attention and ended with the cover for the Radiohead offshoot’s second LP, the artwork was co-created while the band was making the recprd. “I’m a big fan of imaginary maps,” Yorke said in a statement. “I feel that with painting I’m always fighting against telling a story. And then it just happens anyway.” Elaborating on the origins of the artworks in an interview with Monster Children, Donwood reflected: “If you wanted to consider this question while taking the long view, the genesis occurred over twenty years ago as we began to explore a hazy, dreamlike (or nightmarish) realm of volcanoes, pylons, ice, surging storms and blazing infernos, which led to the work we made for the Radiohead record known as Kid A. This sensibility has evolved (or mutated) since then, absorbing more and stranger facets as time passed.”

He continued: “So this was a background to an idea we had of exploring cartography and mapmaking when we began this particular project some time in 2020; Thom had a book of maps of all kinds from all periods in history and that was a kind of kick-start. We were particularly drawn to a series of incredibly detailed maps drawn by Harold Fisk for the US Army Corps of Engineers and to the maps drawn by the military of both sides in WWII, but the ones that were really fascinating and inspiring were those drawn by various Arab sailors and pirates during the Medieval period […] We created a number of map-like pictures, diagrams to reach somewhere wholly imaginary. And then, with no planning, without meaning to, we began to create images of the places you might see if you were to follow these cartographical fantasies of misdirection. This bit didn’t take too long; the whole thing (so far) took about two years, on and off.”

9. St. Vincent, All Born Screaming

St. Vincent and Alex Da Corte’s research for the All Born Screaming artwork started at the Prado in Madrid, surrounded by paintings that have stood the test of time. In an opening essay for Wallpaper, Annie Clark wrote: “We want time-tripping eternal mirrors. We want to be called from the void. We want to be told – tell us, yes, yes – every generation, every century, new rulers, new laws, new plagues, but the same human condition. Welcome to being alive. Welcome to the fire. Welcome to your ecstatic hiccup in a roiling eternity. We are all born screaming. ALL born screaming. All BORN screaming. All born SCREAMING.”

The Wallpaper feature comes with a conversation between the two artists, who go further into the making of the artwork. “When thinking about making All Born Screaming, I want to touch on blackness and colour – light and the depth of the void,” Clark said. “In making the album imagery, you painted the set black. It was the idea that this is a physical space – you can see the skid marks on the floor – but it’s also a void. There was something that felt so powerful about that.” Da Corte noted that there was no mood board for the cover. “In the end, after so many hours of talking and looking, I remember very clearly one drawing I made – of a person on fire – and it just clicked. It was very much chasing a sketch and you can’t promise it will come, but if it does, then great.”

Empress Of, For Your Consideration

Empress Of named her independently released fourth album For Your Consideration as a way of reconsidering what the phrase means, playing on awards-season campaigns as a means of making herself the main character. On the cover artwork, both confident and a little absurdist, the Honduran American producer and singer-songwriter finds herself on top of a large star, over a backdrop of LA, painted gold like an awards prize. “I took that theme of prizes, esteem, glam, Hollywood, and I teamed up with Bethany Vargas, who was the photographer,” Loreley Rodriguez told Elle, “and she was like, “This is your camp Hollywood moment. You’re going to ride a shooting star over a backdrop.

7. Felicia Atkinson, Space as an Instrument

The striking mountain landscape on the cover of Space as an Instrument was done by New York-based Belgian painter Harold Ancart. “I’ve known Harold from when I was living in Brussels in the  2010s and we just finished both art school,” Felicia Atkinson told us in a statement. “I always found his paintings really beautiful: they are timeless, in the same time poetic and mysterious. I like the fact that he uses oil stick to make them, which is an artist’s tool I’ve always found very interesting because it’s between the pencil and the brush, it’s very narrative, it connects drawing to painting directly. When we were exchanging ideas about the album cover, we knew (Bartolomé and I, aka Shelter Press) we wanted a painting, because I’ve always been interested in the dialogue between music and painting, a lot of my tracks refers to painters or paintings, from Georgia O’keefe  to Agnes Martin.” When Ancart sent them those mountains, Atkinson was astonished. “It’s exactly what I was picturing for the record. I love also the blue of the sky in this particular painting, it reminds me the blue in the frescos of the Quattrocento.”

6. Vampire Weekend, Only God Was Above Us

Vampire Weekend’s fifth album broadly draws inspiration from 20th-century New York City, which comes across in its cover artwork, a 1988 photograph by Steven Siegel called Subway Dream 11. The band’s first cover not to feature their name or signature Futura typeface, the artwork is also the source of the album title: a front-page headline in the New York Daily News about the explosion that tore the roof off Aloha Airlines flight 24, quoting a survivor. For a sense of perspective, it’s worth taking a look at the rest of the collection of photos from the same location, which Siegel posted about when the record was released. “Vampire Weekend’s new album, Only God was Above Us, features cover art based on photos taken by me decades ago in a scrap yard that contained dozens of abandoned New York subway cars,” he wrote. “I am honored that this leading rock band has chosen to include my photos as part of their latest release.”

5. The Last Dinner Party, Prelude to Ecstasy

The cover art for The Last Dinner Party’s breakout debut, Prelude to Ecstasy, was shot by Cal McIntyre at East London’s The George Tavern, the same venue where the band played their first show. A picture of the band is hanging on a stone wall, framed above a fireplace whose mantelpiece is adorned with flowers, candles, books, and various antiques. Matching the lavishness and nostalgic opulence of their sound, the image also showcases the band members’ fashion sense, which is at once fantastical and historic, taking cues from various eras. “From the very, very beginning when we started, even before we played live or had more than five rehearsals together, we knew that visuals were going to be half of what made this band important to us,” lead vocalist Abigail Morris told The Line of Best Fit. “We’re very ambitious and very distinct on how we want to look, so it’s important for us to just have complete control over everything.”

4. Mdou Moctar, Funeral for Justice

The cover artworks for Mdou Moctar’s last three albums were all created by Robert Beatty, a musician and artist based in Lexington, Kentucky. According to a New York Times profile, when Beatty was first approached for 2019’s Ilana, he was given a very specific brief, which included the crow and the Cross of Agadez, citing records by Judas Priest, ELO, and Journey as reference points. The large crow on the cover of Funeral for Justice has since been become a trademark of the band’s visual aesthetic, here dripping with blood – a match for the album’s anthems of resistance, wilder and even more furious than before. 

Mikey Coltun, Moctar’s bassist, gave some context around the band’s collaboration with Beatty in a recent conversation with J.R.C.G. “When I came in, there was this idea of, ‘This is not a world music band,’” he recalled. “And it was clear the first time I went to Niger that, Oh, this is very similar to punk music and this is very DIY. And the visual aspect needed to reflect that. Ilana: The Creator was the first record that I did with Mdou, and we were listening to a lot of Black Sabbath and ZZ Top at that time, and kind of wanted something in that world. Robert Beatty came up as somebody who we wanted to work with, and he just nailed it. Then continuing on, we knew we wanted the bird as the icon of the band.”

3. Charli XCX, BRAT

BRAT. Ever heard of it? Even if you haven’t listened to the whole record or its biggest offerings – and I’ve met people over this holiday season who somehow haven’t – you’ll recognize some aspect of its visual aesthetic: Pantone 3570-C, now known as Brat Green, low resolution Arial font with the width set to 90%, the album title written in lowercase. Basic, even ugly – certainly the only album over on this list you wouldn’t dare call beautiful – yet instantly iconic. And there’s no doubt its kitschy look required careful consideration, if only for Charli XCX to convince her team it wasn’t a horrible idea. In fact, her manager, creative director, and friends all though it was “the stupidest idea ever,” which naturally emboldened her vision.

“It actually feels like it very much embodies the word ‘brat’ to kind of not be there because that is sort of less of the norm, I suppose, for female artists,” she said in an interview with Apple Music 1’s Zane Lowe. “That felt punchy. The pixilation makes it looks like it’s kind of been done in this rush… you didn’t get the proper hi-res file… I knew it would generate this conversation. I knew that a lot of people would be sort of frustrated or disappointed by it. And I think for me, it’s like I would rather have those conversations, which actually in some cases became quite explosive, than a picture where people are like, ‘She looks good.’”

2. Blood Incantation, Absolute Elsewhere

At first glance, the cover art of Blood Incantation’s Absolute Elsewehere captures not only the atmosphere but the density and temperature of the music, which is boiling hot. Two pyramids stand on what looks like a barren planet, surrounded by lava pits, mountains, crescent moons, and purple clouds, the star-speckled sky shimmering above. The beautiful artwork was hand-painted by Steve Dodd, who, as this Uproxx feature details, has lived and worked in a small town in Tennessee for all 79 years of his life. It’s a wonder the band was even able to get in touch with him; the artist communicates exclusively through handwritten snail mail. In fact, it was Dodd’s sister who acted as an intermediary between him and vocalist and guitarist Paul Riedl. “It’s easy to get frustrated in this digital age of instant gratification and point-click satisfaction,” Riedl said in the interview. “But we are not in a hurry. We’re not in a rush to make something impressive.”

Riedl also talked about the very minimal instructions they gave to Dodd, explaining the band’s refusal to depict humans on their covers: “We want to deal with something so far in the future that it transcends the limitations of the measly planet Earth. And we also want to inspire the person from wherever they might be. So if a reptilian looks at our album cover, they’re not ostracized, or if a humanoid sees the album cover, they’re not intimidated by seeing a Pleiadian. We want to have no types of figures to exclude any person’s experience of where they’re going to be taken on this journey of the music.” Once Dodd gave them a description and early preview of the artwork, they were instantly satisfied. “What do they say today,” Riedl quipped, “He understood the assignment.”

1. Magdalena Bay, Imaginal Disk

In the music and videos that make up the world of Magdalena Bay’s brilliant sophomore LP, vocalist Mica Tenenbaum portrays a character named True, who is due for a hardware upgrade via a compact disk inserted into her forehead. Both the album’s concept and cover art were developed from the album title itself. “We loved Imaginal Disk for the record and thought of the name fairly early in the process,” the duo told us in a statement. “We loved the double meaning of the disk as a CD, not just as its original meaning of a cellular disc of information.”

Though the duo were visually drawn to films of David Lynch and David Cronenberg, they’re inspired by the physical act of looking at records up close when exploring album cover ideas. “After perusing Amoeba and our music libraries, we realized that a lot of our favorite album covers were portraits/striking images of artists’ faces,” they continued. “We were interested in doing something like that with a twist that went beyond a regular portrait. So once we had the title, the idea of a hand inserting a disk into Mica’s head felt like an obvious next step. We started to put together different sketches and mockups, to figure out more specific questions like the angle of the face, the positioning of the hand, etc. Eventually we took reference photos on an old digital camera that artist Maria Shatalova brought to life in her beautiful cover art.”