July 24, 2024 6:40AM

The 50 Worst Album Covers of All Time

From rock to rap to country and beyond, it’s an assortment of images that you can’t unsee no matter how hard you try

By GAVIN EDWARDS

Hubris, lack of taste, massive amounts of drugs: There are many reasons for terrible album covers.

This gallery collects 50 of the worst. Enter the carnival tent to witness the monstrosities, the design disasters, the images that you can’t unsee no matter how hard you try. As you will see, even as they fail by the traditional yardsticks of being “good” or “visually compelling,” many of these album covers are at least memorable, and so we gather here to celebrate the craziness of these choices, not to shame the artists behind them. (Admittedly, we’re also going to laugh at them.)

Our selection criteria for the list, other than fugliness: We skewed toward major artists with the resources of professional graphic designers who really should have known better. (Some of rock music’s most revered design firms, such as Hipgnosis, are also some of the worst offenders here.) No more than one album per artist. No mercy for the album’s music actually being good (that happens more often than you’d think).

Yes, these are all real. As you look at these album covers, remember: With each one of these, multiple highly paid people thought this was a good idea.

From Rolling Stone US

This cover was painted by Billy Joel’s wife, Christie Brinkley, showing why she’s better known as a model than as a visual artist. We’re not saying that this cover art led to their divorce a year later and Joel never making another studio album, we’re just observing that both of these things happened after she perched a tiny cheetah on his naked shoulder.

There’s a long tradition of scantily clad women on album covers: While a few of them have become cheesecake classics, many others haven’t aged well, and some felt gross and exploitative from the day of their release. This cover, however, is the only one to anticipate the ludicrous aesthetics of the Cats musical and combine it with the libido-deadening sight of a shirtless Kevin Cronin in white suspenders.

Visual puns are not the road to rock & roll nirvana, but they can be slapped on a package that includes “Johnny B. Goode” and nobody will object too much. This food photography may have been state of the art 65 years ago, but now it just looks like a queasy reminder of that time your grandmother gave the family food poisoning because she neglected to refrigerate the whipped cream.

These days, a monstrous nightmare-inducing four-chinned image like this would be quick work in Photoshop, but in 1989 it required many hours of labor by designer Richard Gray on a dedicated state-of-the-art graphics workstation. So … progress?

It’s just bad luck if you made a provocative photo collage about the iniquities of American capitalism, featuring the destruction of the World Trade Center, only months before the terrorist attacks that brought that vision to life, right? Well, what if after the 9/11 attacks you insisted to your record company that you wanted to keep it on your upcoming album? “There’s been a whitewash in the media over the past couple of days over what the U.S.’s role in the world is, and the fact that they kill hundreds of thousands of people per year to protect profit,” said Coup MC Boots Riley. The label was unpersuaded and made the Coup pull the cover.

South Korean animator Beomsik Shimbe Shim attempted to explain the Garbage Pail Kids–inflected art for Yeah Yeah Yeahs’ fourth album: “In a surreal way, the mosquito’s blood sac is glowing through a blazing backlight and throws the bloody caustic effect on the naked boy. Since Karen O wanted the mosquito as a female while the victim is a boy, I considered the mosquito as Karen herself — the female warrior like a rock star. The boy could be anything the Yeah Yeah Yeahs want.” What we want is to look at the cover without burning out our retinas.

There are some artists who might have commissioned a sculpture of themselves, intended to look like the 300-foot-high “The Motherland Calls” at the Russian memorial for the Battle of Stalingrad, as a cheeky comment on the distorting effects of fame and pop-music hagiography. Michael Jackson was not one of those artists: He believed he deserved to be rendered on an epic scale. The image was by special-effects artist Diana Walczak, who did a clay sculpture before rendering it digitally; Jackson gave notes halfway through, concerned that his thighs were too fat.

You can judge an album by its cover! At least some of the time: For example, when you see that the Village People, disco icons, have rebranded themselves with New Romantic haircuts, you can guess that the New Wave music on the disc within will be as awkward and badly conceived as the group’s new look.

While many of the covers in this gallery are felonies against your eyeballs, at least they’re unforgettable. Hard Promises is just dull, because Tom Petty was distracted by his record company’s efforts to jack up the price of his album by a dollar, to $9.98. (In response, he threatened to name it The $8.98 Album.) “You know what was the worst thing about the whole Hard Promises ordeal? We spent so much time fighting about the price that we didn’t realize it was a real boring album cover,” Petty said years later. “Since then, I’ve always been real particular about the album covers. I still cringe when I see Hard Promises.”

When Spinal Tap put out an all-black album cover for Smell the Glove in the movie This Is Spinal Tap, it was intended as parody of rock-star idiocy — “How much more black could this be? And the answer is none. None more black” — not a creative brief. Metallica’s version of Smell the Glove (usually called the Black Album) gussied up the blackness just a little, with some matte-vs.-gloss images that didn’t really work.

Rod Stewart, discussing his debut album in the 2012 book Rod: The Autobiography: “[The] choice of photograph for the front cover, in which an elderly man in a mac appears to be menacing a small child in a park, probably wouldn’t have got very far through the marketing meetings today. What can I say? I thought it was a beguiling image at the time.”

Sufjan Stevens’ attraction to the polychromatic produces beautiful results in his music, as if he wants you to savor every note in the musical spectrum. It also results in hideous album covers where his goal seems to be having as many different colors in as many pixels as possible, and the result is just a gelatinous Technicolor blob.

Inducted into the Grand Ole Opry and on the cusp of country superstardom, Brad Paisley decided that on his fourth album, he would not only sing, play guitar, and cowrite most of the songs, he would tackle the cover design and insist on credit for it in his liner notes. (He kept plugging away at design and packaging for the rest of his career.) His take on Salvador Dali’s The Persistence of Memory was hilariously literal — The clock is melting! Time is wasted, dude! — but it didn’t stop this album from topping the country chart.

Klaus Voormann: cool dude, good friend to the Beatles in Hamburg, great bass line on “You’re So Vain.” But let’s be honest — this cover, which he designed, is a mess. The central notion of the Fab Four getting lost in their own hair is solid, but the photo collage of the mini-Beatles is mostly sloppy, and the portrait of George is so bad that you have to wonder if Harrison owed Voormann money.

California hardcore punk pioneers Black Flag have a great visual legacy: multiple classic covers by Raymond Pettibon (brother of the band’s guitarist, Greg Ginn), not to mention the tattoo-ready four-bars band logo (also by Pettibon). That’s what makes this image, which looks like Eric Cartman might after getting run over by a tractor-trailer full of Sour Patch Kids, not just grotesque but an object lesson on why you should stay on good terms with your siblings.

Stone-cold classic funk album — but shouldn’t at least one of Roger Troutman’s facets involve buttoning up his shirt?

By 1977, country legend George Jones was the Lauryn Hill of his era, known as George “No Show” Jones for his habit of missing his own concerts. This Thomas the Tank Engine–style album cover (George the Tour Bus?) made an implicit promise to fans: Even if Jones didn’t make it to your town for his scheduled gig, at least his bus would, and that was almost as good.

Not the only booty cover in Miami rap history, but this was the album that was legally declared obscene by a U.S. District Court (for the lyrics, not the cover photo). Before the verdict was overturned, people who rallied to the cause of free speech had to live with the fact that when 2 Live Crew exercised their First Amendment rights, they usually did it in a way that was crass and hacky, much like this album art.

So pioneering rocksteady/reggae singer Pat Kelly got dressed up in a sharp orange jacket and polka-dot shirt, made a pit stop on the way to his photo session in Kingston, and on a hot Jamaica day decided that nothing said “sexy” like stripping to the waist, reclining on a random bit of roadside scrub, and leaning against a rock?

Not just a one-off attempt at a music career from Corey Feldman: This was the fifth album by the former child actor. Feldman has a troubled history as a young victim of exploitation and sexual abuse, so here he sends the strong message that when you are succumbing to your demons and falling into a personal hell, the only route to salvation comes through hot blondes in white lingerie.

Sharon Osbourne told photographer Nitin Vadukul to “think dark,” and got back this X-ray-plus-tattoos picture of Ozzy (three-faced just like Satan in the ninth circle of Hell in Dante’s Inferno! A bona fide literary reference to the Prince of Darkness!), which presumably was meant to be terrifying but just looked like Ozzy was getting prepped for gall bladder surgery. By overexposing Ozzy on film, it anticipated his reality show The Osbournes, which debuted the following year.

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American jazz has a storied history in Paris: Many African American artists have traveled to the City of Light to make music away from the racism of their homeland. Vibraphonist and drummer Lionel Hampton, however, apparently went to France to bring on a Technicolor apocalypse where his disembodied floating head would gleefully oversee the city’s destruction.

Speaking of disembodied floating heads heralding the apocalypse: In the same year that Sean Connery starred in the disembodied-floating-head sci-fi movie Zardoz, the Godfather of Soul upped the stakes and committed to a job that nobody asked him to do, giving a troubled nation new nightmares.

If you find this extreme closeup on David Crosby and his much-abused nostrils disquieting and not really suitable for the Hallmark-card treatment of a sun setting over the ocean, just be grateful that it wasn’t Crosby’s disembodied floating head as a harbinger of human annihilation.

It’s one of the goofiest hip-hop album covers in history, but rapper Lil’ Flip, who was then a teenager, knew that parodying the Lucky Charms cereal box got the job done: He represented his Houston neighborhood of Cloverland, he identified with the wee battling man in the Notre Dame logo, and he sold a couple of hundred thousand copies of an independent record. On the other hand, it was impossible to take him seriously after seeing him in a glittery green bow tie.

After rejecting one proposed cover of Bon Jovi dressed as cowboys and another of a curvy girl in a wet T-shirt emblazoned with the Slippery When Wet title, the band and the record label found themselves at an impasse. The improvised last-minute solution: Photographer Mark Weiss sprayed a black garbage bag with water and then singer Jon Bon Jovi wrote the title in the droplets with his finger. As guitarist Richie Sambora noted, “So simple, and not very impressive.”

By 1984, pop-metal singer Billy Squier was desperately trying to fit in with the prevailing 1980s visual trends: consider his trying-way-too-hard “Rock Me Tonite” video, generally considered to be a career killer. On the LP cover, that meant covering up his face with a Trapper Keeper folder to conceal the flop sweat on his brow.

Guitarist Scott Ian on the aggro-but-amateurish cover of Anthrax’s debut album: “It’s horrible, actually. It was [singer] Neil Turbin’s idea from start to finish, and was done by a guy called Kent Joshpe. But it’s also odd, because if you look at the two hands on the cover, they’re both left ones! The hand holding the guy’s head, and the other coming through his mouth — neither is a right hand. The one really good thing to come out of the sleeve was that we got a cool logo.”

This album by the English singer-songwriter Leo Sayer is largely forgotten, but it contained two Number One pop singles (the ballad “When I Need You” and the disco-inflected “You Make Me Feel Like Dancing”). Presumably this photo was taken with Sayer on a trampoline in a studio in front of a blue-sky backdrop. Given his facial expression, however, the disquieting implication is that he’s been ejected from an airplane as punishment for pioneering the suspenders/T-shirt combo look.

Emerson, Lake & Palmer, the storied prog-rock trio, could barely stand each other after eight years together, but they owed the label one more LP, so they went to record it in the Bahamas, spending as little time together in the studio as possible. The music reflects that barely-making-an-effort ethos, as does the Love Beach title (which really should get repurposed as a Fox reality show), but nothing captures the about-to-break-up vibe better than this cover, apparently photographed in the five-minute interval during which they were willing to stand together with unbuttoned shirts.

This was the last of four Van Hagar albums, but surely there’s a better way to illustrate the conflict between Eddie Van Halen and Sammy Hagar than an image of hair-pulling conjoined twins? (Contrary to rumor, the kid posing as both twins is not Wolfgang Van Halen.) For extra ick factor, the twins roughly mimic the shape of the Van Halen logo.

If Spencer Elden can sue Nirvana (unsuccessfully) because he’s unhappy about his appearance as a baby on the cover of Nevermind, shouldn’t the baby on the cover of Tubthumper have the basis for a lawsuit for having unwillingly seared the eyeballs of the entire record-buying public of the Western Hemisphere?

This isn’t even the worst Scorpions LP cover — that would be the original art for the German metal band’s Virgin Killer, featuring a naked 12-year-old girl, which is why we won’t be compiling it here. This is a fitting companion piece, since the bubblegum image is basically a 12-year-old boy’s vision of what happens in the back of limousines.

Judging by this picture, we have to conclude that the secret to soft-rock success was lots of hair: robust beards, hirsute chests, nipples crowned in fuzz. (We’re definitely supposed to pay attention to that hairy nipple, given the index finger pointing right at it.) But this album cover doesn’t work because it aims for “fantasy of debauched orgy with the whole band” and ends up at “nightmare where we forgot to put on our clothes before the gig” instead.

You may have seen better art on religious tracts handed out by missionaries at the bus station. The big takeaway here: According to Bob Dylan, God is a righty.

What do you notice first about this cover? If you’re a Bee Gees fan, it might be the absence of Robin Gibb: He had recently quit the band for a solo career, temporarily leaving his brothers Barry and Maurice behind. For everybody else, it’s that Australia’s finest are clad in medieval armor and red plumes. It’s a still from a BBC movie they starred in (also called Cucumber Castle), but given the multiple fashion phases the Gibbs went through, let’s just enjoy the absurdity of this image and assume they had a period where they regularly went onstage wearing chain mail.

Abandoning the fantasy cover art of Roger Dean, Yes opted for a naked man looking up at some skyscrapers. In the spirit of glorious prog-rock excess, it was a triple-gatefold LP, which meant that it unfolded to reveal … more skyscrapers. They were presumably meant to evoke “generic office buildings,” but in fact were the very identifiable Century Plaza Towers in the Los Angeles region. Singer Jon Anderson said the lines on the cover intersecting with the man’s torso represented “points of the anatomy relative to our development,” which means that either we don’t understand the artistic concept or he doesn’t.

Some elements of popular music now seem dated only a few years later: for example, specific drum-machine sounds or references to short-lived dance crazes. But it turns out that nothing dates an album more decidedly than having the cover art look like an internet browser. (Yeah, this is what a lot of the net looked like in 1998, when people still referred to it as the World Wide Web.) In case you’re confused, Florida rapper Trick Daddy helpfully includes an update at the bottom of the screen: “you are now ‘on-line.’”

If not for our self-imposed limit of one album per artist, country star David Allan Coe would have multiple entries on this list: perhaps Texas Moon (Coe and his band mooning the camera) or Son of the South (Coe draped in a Confederate flag with his baby son on his lap) or maybe Family Album (Coe with two of his wives — he was a polygamist who was married to as many as seven women at the same time). But of all his bonkers cover art, this one, where a shirtless Coe poses on the beach with conch shells for a Caribbean-inflected album, goes the furthest over the top, with the enormous “David Allan Coe” belt buckle being the crowning touch. The package feels like a Dirk Diggler side project late in the running time of Boogie Nights.

Given that this album was a particularly craven effort to cash in on the disco trend, it’s fitting that the train is barreling toward Donny Osmond, who isn’t going to be able to push that piano off the tracks in time. Also, the shawl and top hat combo, while groovy in its own demented way, wasn’t often spotted in discos.

Apparently, Black Tarrzann wears a nice fleece-lined sweater and sports a gold watch; has affinity with bears, eagles, stags, and lions; and is the victim of one of the worst Photoshop atrocities of the 21st century. Wu-Tang Clan rapper Cappadonna did not take criticism of this cover well, so we’ll just say that on the upside, it reminds us of the tuna-vs.-shark argument in The Other Guys when Mark Wahlberg tells Will Ferrell, “If I were a lion and you were a tuna, I would swim out in the middle of the ocean and freaking eat you, and then I’d bang your tuna girlfriend.”

Dolly Parton, photographed in Nashville near the Country Music Hall of Fame for the cover of her twelfth solo album, appears in the background and also disturbingly manifests as a vision inside a fountain. Album buyers are left to decide whether the light in Nashville refracts in unusual ways, whether Parton is a water witch entrusted with Excalibur, or whether the fountain is a metaphor for the music industry stealing performers’ souls and turning them into evanescent froth.

As a visual metaphor for the effort Three Dog Night had put into recording this LP, which contained the hit single “The Show Must Go On,” the album featured a giant mutant chicken creature in a hospital delivery room giving birth, attended by a team of obstetricians in scrubs. Her offspring, held with forceps, is a vinyl LP. The public reaction was strongly and immediately negative: The record company promptly covered up the lower portion of the cover with a large Band-Aid style bandage so that nobody would think that giant mutant chicken creatures give birth to anything except baby mutant chicken creatures.

The Kanye Conundrum: Does he mean it? In this case, does he actually believe that this is a compelling album cover, or is he trying to push an eyesore aesthetic so far that it goes around the bend and becomes art, or is he just too distracted by the squirrels inside his head to care? The answer: It doesn’t matter! Just like Ye said actual antisemitic things, and you don’t have to waste your time parsing whether he was being “ironic,” you can say that whatever his intentions were, this album got hit by the ugly stick and then move on.

Remember Cecilia Giménez, the elderly Spanish woman who took it upon herself to restore a 19th-century fresco of Jesus Christ in the Santuario de la Misericordia in city of Borja, despite no actual artistic experience or ability, and made such a botch of it that the result became international news in 2012 and was nicknamed “Monkey Christ”? Yeah, that’s the vibe here, except nobody’s lining up to take a selfie in front of this Aretha album.

Another cover that got pulled by the record company just before it was officially released. Ted Nugent’s misogyny was extremely on-brand for him by this point, so we can only wonder which element was one step too far for an anonymous marketing executive. Was it having the naked model trussed up like a turkey? Was it having her served on a plate with enormous vegetables? Was it the grenade in her mouth?

Rejected album titles: 1. Was All That Money I Made Last Year for Wieners on the Moon? 2. If You Believe in a Dog on the Moon 3. The Hot Dog on the Broken Stick Is a Neil Young Reference 4. How Are We Going to Grill These Hot Dogs Without Oxygen? 5. There Are No Wieners on the Moon, Actually It’s All Wieners

If you want proof that nepotism is a scourge on our cultural landscape, you need only consider this album cover, the creation of guitarist Mark Tremonti’s brother Daniel Tremonti. We’d be annoyed by the semi-competent Photoshop fakery of the band’s faces being digitally carved into a digital tree, except that no real-life tree deserves to have Creed carved into it.

If you’re the lead singer of an internationally renowned rock band like the Who and you record a solo album at the height of your band’s success, the only good reason for doing that is because that allows you to express a side of your personality that has been squelched by your main gig: being a goddamn centaur. Bonus points for Daltrey not only pumping his fist at the awesomeness of finally living out his dream, but also doing an impossible backbend and pumping his hoof.

Five Gollum-looking dudes lolling around on a bed of nitrate-infused meat? Sure, that’s a fair representation of Limp Bizkit. Following up on their breakthrough hit Significant Other, the nu metal band leaned even harder into being repulsive — “chocolate starfish” is a slang term for “asshole,” a nickname vocalist Fred Durst adopted with pride — as a substitute for an actual artistic philosophy. This cover (made by the band’s guitarist, Wes Borland) is both tacky and gross, but at least it works as a warning label: What you see is what you get.

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