The 100 Best Album Covers of All Time

The Pet Shop Boys were ahead of their time in so many ways, but the U.K. Eighties synth-pop duo created a new kind of cool on their 1987 hit Actually. Neil Tennant and Chris Lowe look dapper, dressed up in black-tie, except Neil is yawning. “We liked it because it wasn’t a cop-out ‘Please, please, please buy me’ photo,” Tennant said. “It was sort of uncompromising and funny at the same time.” It summed up the duo’s ironic wit, their mix of cosmopolitan club chic, and jaded London ennui, as in hits like “West End Girls,” “Rent,” “Shopping,” and “Left to My Own Devices.” The photo was taken by Cindy Palmano on the set of the Boys’ splashiest video, a lavish Vegas spectacle for their Dusty Springfield duet “What Have I Done to Deserve This?” So why was Tennant yawning? “I was tired.” —R.S.

Comprised of Puerto Rican rapper Residente and multi-instrumentalist Visitante — two class-conscious art-school kids who happen to be stepbrothers — Calle 13 made great strides for Latin hip-hop with an avant-garde approach to the reggaeton sounds that were sweeping Latin America. They released their 2005 self-titled debut on White Lion Records, then home of the intrepid MC Tego Calderón, and paired shock-jocking hit songs like “Atrévete-te-te” with suggestive album art to match. The cover image, of which the origin is unknown, features the side profile of a woman with a barbell tongue piercing, giving an ice-cream cone a big, gratuitous lick. —S.E.

On their legendary debut 12-inch, “Eric B. Is President,” Long Island’s Eric B. and Rakim had already introduced a new way to rhyme. However the arrival of full-length Paid in Full meant new ways to flex: Their fashion choices were unlike anything the world had ever seen. The Gucci logos all over their jackets came courtesy of Dapper Dan, the Harlem tailor who turned luxury brands into much-coveted streetwear. And the jewelry showed that Rakim no longer had to dream about getting paid. “Me and Eric never really competed with wearing gold, because we knew if one of us bought something, the other one would go up the block and buy something too,” Rakim told author Brian Coleman. “Eric was getting a new piece, like, every two weeks.” —C.W.

The London art-glam savants Roxy Music made their album covers a crucial part of their aesthetic. The records looked just how they sounded: Eurotrash glamour with a satirical edge, starring danger girls who mixed fashion and camp with a Seventies touch of evil. Singer-poseur Bryan Ferry was also the art director on classics like Siren and Country Life. But Roxy’s kinkiest cover was also their musical peak, For Your Pleasure. Amanda Lear, a consort of the Surrealist painter Salvador Dali, strikes a pose against the late-night Vegas skyline, with a black panther on a leash. On the back, her chauffeur awaits: Ferry himself. Lear was ahead of her time. “1973 was too early for the black-leather dominatrix look,” she said. “They wanted a girl who looked like a Hitchcock movie, a little bit dangerous but arrogant at the same time.” —R.S.

The die-cut sleeve — a cover with shapes cut into it, exposing artwork behind it — is a tradition as old as classic-rock itself (witness the windows of the tenement building on Led Zeppelin’s Physical Graffiti). And the Stones did it better than anyone on Some Girls. The front parodied fashion and cosmetics ads, with each die-cut displaying a photo of a fashion icon — Marilyn Monroe, Raquel Welch, Farrah Fawcett-Majors. When the stars on the cover (or their survivors) threatened legal action for using the images without permission, the cover was reconfigured. But the Stones still came out ahead: Beyond its basic cleverness, the artwork had a tawdry irreverence that matched the new layer of musical grime on the album. —D.B.  

In the late Nineties, the Roots wanted to make you dance to their limber, jazzy grooves; they wanted to make you marvel at the lyrical excellence of Black Thought and Malik B; and just as importantly, they wanted to make you think about the injustice and cruelty in the world. That last part is what they chose to emphasize for the cover of their best album. Art director Kenny Gravilis chose five historic photos for alternate versions of the CD release, ranging from a bombed-out church to a baby crying in wartime. For the main cover, he selected an evocative image of two young Black people fleeing riot police in 1960s Brooklyn. “Seeing real fear in the woman’s face is very affecting,” Gravilis recalled. “It feels unflinching and aggressive in its commentary on society.” —S.V.L.

The original cover art concept for Liz Phair’s debut, Exile in Guyville, was an orgy of naked Barbie dolls floating in a swimming pool, an image Phair borrowed from a friend’s college film. Her label Matador rejected that idea and recruited Nash Kato of the Chicago band Urge Overkill to do a photo shoot instead. As Phair recalled years later, “He was like, ‘Oh, and remember to put lipstick on your nipples,’ because I have very light-pink nipples. I figured it was some weird porno thing he knew about. Like, ‘Wow, that’s why the nipples always look so good!’ I was sort of shy. He really wanted me to just be like sex.” The rawness of the shot fit perfectly with songs like “Flower” and “Fuck and Run.” Over the years, some editions of the album cropped out Phair’s nipple. But now it’s a permanent fixture on the cover. —A.W.

“In my world, you can be a gangsta with a dress or you can be a gangsta with baggy pants,” said Young Thug in a video for Calvin Klein. “I feel like there’s no such thing as gender.” The remarkable cover for his 2016 release Jeffery personifies that philosophy. Photographed by Garfield Larmond, it finds the Atlanta rapper wearing a billowing purple-and-white skirt made by Italian designer Alessandro Trincone. During the shoot, it took an hour and a half to assemble the piece and another 30 minutes “to pin stuff up, get the hat right.” But the result stands as a statement of how modern-day rappers have embraced, albeit tentatively, a less-rigidly-masculine and gender-bending reality. “When he put it on, it definitely spoke for itself,” said Larmond. “Everyone knew this is different.” —M.R.

Before Bruce Springsteen entered Annie Leibovitz’s New York studio to shoot the cover of Born in the U.S.A., he told her he wanted the American flag to play a prominent role in the image. “I was very conscious of being an American musician and addressing the issues of the day,” Springsteen said in 2006. “There was a sense that the flag was up for grabs, that you had the right in staking out your claims to its meaning.” Leibovitz and art director Andrea Klein photographed him in front of the flag in all sorts of poses, but they ultimately chose a simple shot of Springsteen’s midsection facing the flag, with a red hat dancing out of his back pocket. “In the end, the picture of my ass looked better than the picture of my face,” Springsteen said in 1984, “so that’s what went on the cover.” —A.G.

In 1969, Miles Davis needed cover art to match the sprawling avant-garde funk of his double-album opus, Bitches Brew. Enter Mati Klarwein, a globetrotting German-born Surrealist who hung out with Dalí, Warhol, and Hendrix, and held court at a New York loft featuring a cubic temple adorned with his paintings. As Klarwein later recalled, Davis “came to see my temple, and he said he wanted to buy it.… Then he told me to come and visit because he wanted to pay me for the cover of Bitches Brew.” The resulting two-panel image featured huge mirror-image faces, a couple embracing while gazing out at the ocean, a blazing pink flower, and tribespeople dressed in splendid garb. It looked like the cover of an Afrofuturist sci-fi novel, and it aptly summed up the trumpeter’s forward-looking stance. —H.S.

The mystery woman on the cover of Duran Duran’s Rio became one of the era’s defining pop images. “The Mona Lisa of the Eighties,” Duran Duran’s Nick Rhodes calls her. They commissioned artist Patrick Nagel, who sent them a massive five-by-five canvas painting of their New Romantic muse, with her confident, all-knowing smile. “There she was,” John Taylor recalled. “The girl who was dancing on the sand.” It was a bold move in 1982 for a rock band to put a smiling woman on the cover, but as Rhodes said, “We all looked at it and smiled back at the girl.” In June 2024, the cover star was finally identified as model Marcie Hunt, from a 1981 cover of Vogue Paris; she’s now a Napa Valley winery owner and Duran Duran fan who danced to “Rio” at her wedding. —R.S.

Led Zeppelin’s music always had a certain rustic tinge underlying its heavy-metal thunder. The cover of their sweeping, elegiac fourth LP subtly evokes that dichotomy, showing a vintage photograph of an old man stooped over with a massive bundle of sticks strapped to his back — an image that Robert Plant dug up at a Reading, England, junk shop — and on the back portion of the gatefold, a modern apartment building. Jimmy Page said that juxtaposition represented “the destruction of the old, and the new coming forward.” In another, contemporary interview, the guitarist further elaborated on the plight of the mysterious “stick man” — who was revealed last year to be a roof thatcher named Lot Long. “The old man carrying the wood is in harmony with nature. He takes from nature and he gives back to the land,” Page said. “His old cottage gets pulled down and they put him in these urban slums; old slums; terrible places.” —H.S.

You wanted the best, and you got it — the hottest band in the land, Kiss, in their most iconic album cover, Alive! Kiss weren’t selling many records at this point, but the cover of Alive! made them rock stars, arguably more than the actual album did. Fin Costello’s photo introduces the four superheroes: Gene dragons out, Ace rocks, Paul flaunts his seven-inch heels, and somewhere in the smoke, there’s a cat on drums. It’s the ultimate visual myth-making statement from the band that practically invented visual myth-making. (It’s the template for every boy-band or girl-group cover since.) But this isn’t an actual concert photo — they’re posing in an empty Detroit theater — just as the band members have hemmed and hawed about whether any of the music was recorded live. As Gene Simmons said, “If you look at it, you’ll see Ace is holding his guitar upside down.” —R.S.

If the entire Greenwich Village folk scene of the early Sixties had to be defined by a single image, it would unquestionably be the cover of The Freehweelin’ Bob Dylan. Shot by CBS staff photographer Don Hunstein, it shows Dylan and girlfriend Suze Rotolo walking down Jones Street between Bleecker Street and West 4th Street on a frigid February day. “I felt like an Italian sausage,” Rotolo said in 2008. “Every time I look at that picture, I think I look fat.” To everyone else, it was a tiny glimpse into a world of youth, freedom, and boundless creativity. When the Coen brothers created 2013’s Inside Llewyn Davis, which took place in New York during the folk revival, they drew heavily from it. “The Freewheelin’ Bob Dylan cover was the color-palette template for the movie,” Joel Coen said. “Also the general-feeling template for the movie in terms of gray, New York, slushy, no sunshine, cold.” —A.G.

Two worlds merging … or two worlds colliding? It’s an unresolved tension illustrated by the evocative cover for Public Enemy’s third album, Fear of a Black Planet. The collage, by B.E. Johnson, shows a black planet embossed with the PE logo slowly eclipsing Earth. “Chuck D was always very hands-on with his artwork,” recalled Cey Adams, who was part of Def Jam’s in-house art department, the Drawing Board. Def Jam reached out to Johnson, who was part of NASA’s fine-art program. “The primary reason I was hired to do this cover was my reputation in the [aerospace] industry,” Johnson wrote on his blog, Imperial Earth. “I explained the physics and provided several sketches and diagrams to illustrate the basic point. Chuck got it and let me have full reign on the design.” —M.R.

For a period in the Sixties and Seventies, album designers toyed with the shape of covers: a Rod Stewart album looked like a shot glass, a Traffic album had its corners cut off, and the Small Faces went for a round cover that must have rolled off record-store shelves at a spectacular rate. Even in those heady days, the original jacket of Bob Marley and the Wailers’ first album for Island was pretty blazing. Designed by Rod Dyer and Bob Weiner, the record didn’t just look like a Zippo lighter: The top half had a hinge that allowed you to flip it open, like a lighter, and pull out the LP inside. The packaging was so costly that it was eventually replaced by a straight-up shot of Marley smoking a massive joint. Luckily, a 50th-anniversary reissue of the album last year reproduced the fake lighter, at least in a photograph, so we can all remember the days before ingenious, no-cost-spared ideas like this went up in smoke. —D.B.

As Talking Heads were finishing up their 1980 art-funk masterpiece, Remain in Light, bassist Tina Weymouth and drummer Chris Frantz paid a visit to Weymouth’s brother Yann at MIT in Boston, where he was creating software for the U.S. Defense Department. With help from one of Yann’s colleagues, they began manipulating some photos — including band headshots, and images of Grumman Avenger bomber planes — on what Frantz called a “humongous mainframe computer” in his 2020 memoir. “After several tries with different colors we arrived at an image of the four band members with roughly-painted red masks on their faces,” Frantz wrote. Designer Tibor Kalman inverted each “A” in the band’s name, completing an arresting, slightly unsettling image that, fittingly, looked as much like a poster for an art exhibition as it did a post-punk album cover. —H.S.

Elvis never looked more flamboyantly Elvis than he does on his 1959 hits collection, 50,000,000 Elvis Fans Can’t Be Wrong. The King struts in his gold lamé suit, surrounded by duplicate images of himself, the center of his own glittery solar system. Colonel Parker commissioned the suit from legendary Hollywood tailor Nudie Cohn. Elvis wore the full gold tuxedo onstage only three times — he never liked the pants, which constricted his wiggling. By the time the record came out, he was in the Army and the suit was in storage. But this became his most iconic album cover, as well as his most parodied, copied by everyone from the Fall (50,000 Fall Fans Can’t Be Wrong) to Bon Jovi (100,000,000 Bon Jovi Fans Can’t Be Wrong) to Phil Ochs (“50 Phil Ochs Fans Can’t Be Wrong”). The suit is now on display at Graceland. —R.S.

For the past five decades, British artist Roger Dean has worked with Yes to create surreal landscape imagery that’s as bold, complex, and evocative as their music. It’s a misty universe of floating islands, massive rock formations that defy all laws of gravity, and the occasional dragon with butterfly wings. His work reached its apex with 1974’s Relayer, where he drew two men on horseback walking into the opening of a massive, colorless cave-like structure, inspired by the song “Gates of Delirium.” “I was playing with the ideas of the ultimate castle,” Dean said, “the ultimate wall of a fortified city. That was more of a fantastical idea. I was looking for the kinds of things like the Knights Templar would have made or what you’d see in the current movie Lord of the Rings — the curving, swirling cantilevers right into space.” —A.G.

David Bowie loved using each album cover to show off his latest personality: the glam starlet of Hunky Dory, the dazed alien of Low, the modern lover of Let’s Dance. On Ziggy Stardust, Bowie played an extraterrestrial rock star, but for the cover, he avoided a flashy close-up. Instead, it’s Ziggy in a London alleyway off Hadden Street on a rainy night, with his blue jumpsuit and guitar. “He wanted to come over like a real stranger,” photographer Brian Ward said. “Like a science-fiction movie.” Bowie posed under a sign that says “K. West,” inspiring endless fan theories. “People read so much into it,” he told Rolling Stone in 1993. “They thought K. West must be some sort of code for ‘quest.’ It took on all these sort of mystical overtones.” Years later, there was another interpretation: Was Bowie predicting a future hip-hop legend? Sorry, but K. West was a high-end London furrier. —R.S.

Who was that masked man? This classic black-and-white portrait by Eric Coleman became the most familiar image of underground hip-hop’s most mysterious figure. “I was thinking of the cover for King Crimson’s In the Court of the Crimson King. I use to check out that big red screaming face on the King Crimson album in my dad’s vinyl [collection] when I was a little kid, and it really shook me — I was actually scared looking through his vinyl,” said designer Jeff Jank. “I hoped this picture of this guy with a metal mask would do the same to some other five-year-old somewhere.” The ever-elusive MF Doom initially groaned at seeing his face on an album cover, but the image would end up becoming essential to his myth. “The character himself, Doom, will always have the mask,” the rapper born Daniel Dumile once said. “No one will ever see him without the mask; maybe in his own private quarters.” —C.W.

With this cut-and-paste job, the Sex Pistols held the United Kingdom’s moral center for ransom. The band’s use of the word “bollocks” resulted in a legitimate obscenity trial. “Much as my colleagues and I wholeheartedly deplore the vulgar exploitation of the worst instincts of human nature for the purchases of commercial profits by both you and your company,” the judge said, “we must reluctantly find you not guilty of the four charges.” But well beyond the disputed language, it was Jamie Reid’s eye-melting art that would end up making the biggest mark, its hot-pink-on-yellow blast throwing out all the rules of graphic design. Reid would talk about the influence of Dada and Situationism, but frontman Johnny Rotten preferred a different explanation in his biography: “There was no great master plan, it was just the simplest and ugliest thing we could come up with on a bored afternoon.” —C.W.

The first album released on Rolling Stones Records came with a real zipper you could move up and down, an idea Andy Warhol had suggested to Mick Jagger at a party in 1969. Warhol took the photo, with the cover subject appearing in his briefs on the inside of the LP. “The problem was shipping them,” Jagger later recalled. “When we zipped up the cover, the weight of all the albums made a dent in the vinyl.” They solved that problem by pulling down the zipper so it would only dent the label. The album art also featured the debut of the Stones’ new logo, a drawing based on Jagger’s lips and mouth. But it wasn’t Mick on the cover. The owner of the crotch in question remains a mystery. “I wanted it to be ambiguous,” recalled designer Craig Braun, who oversaw the packaging for Sticky Fingers. “I said, ’If girls think that that’s Mick’s dick, we’re going to sell more albums.’” —J.D. 

Prince truly found his artistic stride on his third album, Dirty Mind, and fittingly its cover felt like an introduction to everything daring and transgressive about his music. You didn’t have to drop the needle on explicit songs like “When You Were Mine” and “Head” to understand that Prince was going to push boundaries of what was acceptable for a male R&B star at the dawn of the 1980s. You could tell right away from its cover, which featured the then-rising musical polymath dressed in bikini briefs and a trench coat, with a pin on the lapel that said “rude boy.” As Warner Bros. head of publicity Bob Merlis told Rolling Stone years later, “In the disco era, many album covers had women in bikinis. But this was the great thing about Prince: He forced that androgyny on you. He really broke new ground.” —J.D.

On the surface, SZA’s cover pays homage to Princess Diana by replicating a famous 1997 paparazzi image of the latter. The tribute, photographed by Daniel Sannwald and art directed by Tom Schneider, appeared shortly after the 25th anniversary of Diana’s death. “Originally, I was supposed to be on top of, like, a shipping barge,” SZA told Hot 97. “And then at the last minute, we, like, didn’t get clearance to get the shipping barges that we wanted, and we were like, ‘We’re gonna build the diving board instead.’” SOS not only evokes SZA’s sense of feeling as isolated as the late princess, but also how pop-culture iconography resonates in startling ways, in this case inspiring an R&B superstar from St. Louis who sings about romance and despair in equal measure. —M.R.

For their 1977 classic, Fleetwood Mac chronicled their intraband drama, affairs, and breakups into a pop-rock masterpiece they cheekily titled Rumours. The cover depicts two band members who had recently done some “shacking up” of their own. A graceful Stevie Nicks wears a black chiffon dress and pointe shoes, while ponytailed drummer Mick Fleetwood stands in waistcoat and intensely tight pants, with a pair of wooden balls dangling between his legs. (According to Fleetwood, the boyish decoration was actually a set of “lavatory chains” he found at a very early Mac show; “I must admit I had a couple of glasses of English ale — and came out of the toilet with these,” he recalled years later.) As if that wasn’t eccentric enough, there’s a third ball on the cover of Rumours: a crystal orb, sitting in the palm of Fleetwood’s hand. The whole concept is a wonderfully weird and theatrical way to represent the best breakup album of all time. —A.M.