The 100 Best Album Covers of All Time

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.

On the cover of ODB’s first record outside of the Wu Tang Clan enclave, photographer Danny Clinch captured the late rapper’s braids in all their coiled glory. But the artwork around it, by the late Canadian designer Brett Kilroe, is as multi-textured as Wu Tang tracks. On one hand, it’s a homage to, or parody of, a public-assistance ID card, both somber (“Identification Card for Food Coupons”) and jokey (“The City of Brooklyn Zoo,” which also references the Wu Tang offshoot). It’s funny and clever, with a hint of a “wanted” poster that plays off ODB’s rebel image. But in light of how high the poverty rate in America was in 1995, the card was a potent symbol of that epidemic. Some wondered if it later inspired the jacket of Tyler, the Creator’s Call Me If You Get Lost, but Tyler denied it, though he admitted that Return to the 36 Chambers is “most people’s reference point for an ID on a rap album.” —D.B.

Following up your masterpiece is an unenviable task for any band. Coming on the heels of the famously baroque packaging of the Beatles’ Sgt. Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club Band, pop artist Richard Hamilton suggested a hard 180. “Sgt. Pepper’s cover was so filled with activity,” he remembers telling Paul McCartney, “that it might be nice to have a completely clean sheet and just do a white cover.” When The Beatles was released the following year, the all-white, graphic-free, photo-devoid cover promptly became one of the most famous pieces of conceptual art in history. The first 2 million covers were machine-stamped with a unique serial number, making each copy of this double LP a one-of-a-kind art object. Ringo Starr’s personal copy — catalog number 0000001 — sold for nearly $800,000 at a 2015 auction. —C.W.

The cover of the Ramones’ legendary New York punk debut perfectly crystalizes their image as bored, menacing black-leather cretins. The band had initially wanted the cover to be an homage to the Beatles’ first U.K. album, Meet the Beatles, but thought the results turned out terrible. So they went with an image from a photo shoot for a story that had appeared in Punk magazine, taken outside in the afternoon on the Bowery, on the Lower East Side of Manhattan, just down the street from CBGB, the iconic club where they’d gotten their start. The exact location was the wall of a private community garden called Albert’s Garden. As photographer Roberta Bayley later recalled, “I always thought that because it was a casual situation among friends, that it probably made them more relaxed and more natural.” —J.D.

Just weeks before of the Covid pandemic began, Bad Bunny released his landmark 2020 album, YHLQMDLG, or “Yo Hago Lo Que Me Da La Gana,” which is Spanish for “I do whatever I want.” Evoking the same sci-fi comic-book feel of shows like Stranger Things, the artwork and accompanying music videos were conceptualized by Bad Bunny and executed by his longtime visual collaborator, Colombian American director Stillz. The visuals center around a young clairvoyant kid who possesses a mysterious third eye, which has been Bad Bunny’s calling card since 2018. “He’s just different,” explained Bad Bunny of the character, who reflects his own highly sensitive demeanor. “When a group of boys bother him [and] steal his little hat, they uncover his third eye.… Then cars start to fly, the sky darkens, people get hysterical. So he runs home, to his room, where he feels safe.” —S.E.

When photographer and graphic designer Keith “Keef” MacMillan first listened to Black Sabbath, as the label Vertigo prepped their debut album, he was struck by the band’s dark vibes. So he set up a shoot at a 15th-century watermill about 80 minutes from London. “It was quite a run-down and quite spooky place,” he told Rolling Stone. “The undergrowth was quite thick and quite tangled, and it just had a kind of eerie feel to it.” He hired 19-year-old model Louisa Livingstone to appear as an ominous, witchy-looking woman in a black cloak. “It was absolutely freezing. I remember Keith rushing around with dry ice, throwing that into the pond nearby, and that didn’t seem to be working very well, so he was using a smoke machine,” Livingstone told Rolling Stone. The effect, captured on aerochrome film, was chilling, perfectly embodying the feel of heavy metal on the genre’s first album. —K.G.

Stankonia was the name of the studio where OutKast created their fourth, career-defining LP. Andre 3000 called it “this place I imagined where you can open yourself up and be free to express anything.” In the cover photo, shot by Michael Lavine, the duo express that liberation through contrasting looks — Big Boi in a simple white T-shirt and Dungeon Family necklace, and Andre shirtless with a head scarf and tight leather pants. The background is a riff on the American flag, which appears in black-and-white with the stars inverted. Standing side by side on an album cover for the final time (the two would appear in split images on the front of both 2003’s Speakerboxxx/The Love Below and 2006’s Idlewild), they could almost be running mates announcing their candidacy. And much like their increasingly liberated sound, their platform remains irresistible. —H.S.

In May 1971, the Who and photographer Ethan Russell were driving back to London from a gig in Liverpool when they passed several huge concrete monoliths situated in a coal slag heap. “It looked like the surface of the moon,” Russell recalled of the setting. They all gathered around one of the structures, and Russell shot a series of photos, including some inspired by the opening monolith sequence in Stanley Kubrick’s 2001: A Space Odyssey. The final image was considerably more casual, featuring the four band members in the aftermath of relieving themselves, though, apparently, only Pete Townshend was able to actually summon a stream. Beyond that, Russell has said, “we just filled some empty 35 mm film canisters with water and poured it on the cement.” The bleak yet oddly endearing image paired nicely with a heartfelt band that was never afraid of taking the piss. —H.S.

Few images capture the magic of the Seventies songwriter era like Jim McCrary’s cover of Tapestry, where Carole King sits on her Laurel Canyon window ledge. With her denim jeans, barefoot feet, and free-flowing curly hair, you’d never be able to tell that she was once a married East Coaster and Brill Building mastermind before she decided to follow the sun. “Her persona on Tapestry feels like listening to a close friend intimately sharing the truths of her life so that you can discover the truths of your own,” said Taylor Swift, when she welcomed King into the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame in 2021. An honorable mention goes to the album’s other cover star, Telemachus, the kitty King described as “perhaps the most famous tabby cat on earth.” We’re inclined to agree. —A.M.

“I wanted you to know who I am: what the streets taste like, feel like, smell like,” Nas said of his debut. On Illmatic, the 20-year-old hip-hop prodigy wrought raw poetry from the world of the Queensbridge projects where he grew up. “He was an older, wiser character for such a young man,” recalled photographer Danny Clinch, who superimposed a photo of the rapper as a child (taken by his father, jazz musician Olu Dara) over a Queensbridge intersection. “It just felt like you get to see the neighborhood in a larger way,” Nas recalled of the image. Just as Illmatic established Nas as one of the premier rappers of the 1990s, the album’s cover was a career-making moment for Clinch, who’d go on to work with Bruce Springsteen, Björk, and Bob Dylan, among many other artists. —J.D.

In the “Anger” section of Beyoncé’s film Lemonade, she swaggers in a fur coat, her hair parted into cornrows, amidst an assembly of dancers in a dank, dark parking garage. A still from that clip also graces the album cover. (The Lemonade project was assembled by several directors, and it’s unclear who designed the cover.) If the visual found Beyoncé aggressively posturing to the sound of her Jack White collaboration “Don’t Hurt Yourself,” the cover finds her in repose, her face blocked by her arm. The album itself, a widely praised masterwork that explores Black women’s fortitude despite personal and political obstacles, finds an excellent symbol in this image of disquieting tension. —M.R.

For Sgt. Pepper, the Beatles wanted a cover as daftly ambitious as the album. They got it: the Fab Four standing in a crowd of faces from throughout history. Photographer Michael Cooper shot the cover on March 30, 1967, at his Chelsea Manor Studios in London when the album was nearly done — right after the shoot, the band rushed back to Abbey Road for one final all-nighter to cut “With a Little Help From My Friends.” They’re surrounded by life-size cardboard cutouts, created by designer Peter Blake. Paul chose avant-garde artists like Karlheinz Stockhausen and William S. Burroughs; John added writers like Oscar Wilde and James Joyce; George’s picks were all Indian gurus. it’s a shrine of their private jokes and obsessions. There’s pot plants, a hookah, wax statues of the Moptops. John brought in his TV. You can spot their old Liverpool friend Stu Sutcliffe, who died back in Hamburg, Germany. Sgt. Pepper became the most imitated, most parodied, most analyzed album artwork ever. —R.S.

“It wasn’t meant to be about anybody dying,” Courtney Love said of Hole’s brilliant 1994 album. “It was about going through fucking media humiliations like this. You try it — because it ain’t fun.” That raw intensity was summed up perfectly in Ellen von Unwerth’s cover image of model Leilani Bishop, dressed as a beauty-pageant winner in a feather haircut and glittery tiara. Love took Stephen King’s Carrie and transformed it into her own aesthetic, from the Barbie-esque font to the mascara dramatically streaming down her cheeks. In recent years, pop stars like Olivia Rodrigo and Chappell Roan have replicated the iconic look. Whether or not the homages were intentional or accidental, Love has made it clear she’s well-aware of them. “Honey, if I had a dollar for everyone [sic] this happens?” she said. “I’d be real rich!” —A.M.

One of the most visually arresting examples of how album art has been revived in the modern era, Lamar’s acclaimed 2015 record displayed a black-and-white photo (by French photographer Denis Rouvre) of a house party outside of the White House. Lamar himself called it “just taking a group of homies who haven’t seen the world and putting them in these places that they haven’t necessarily seen … and them being excited about it.” But a closer examination reveals so much more: Lamar holding a baby, above a clearly deceased white judge, and a kid with a blurred-out middle finger, which just happens to be right above one of those odious “parental advisory — explicit content” labels. With their cash and booze, everybody’s either preparing for the revolution or celebrating a victory, which also makes it deliciously ambiguous. If hip-hop album art has a Sgt. Pepper, this is it. —D.B.

The only words on the cover of The Velvet Underground & Nico are Warhol’s name (the album’s “producer”) and “Peel slowly and see,” which were tantamount to a “drink me” instruction card in Alice in Wonderland. An arrow points at a yellow banana peel, which on closer inspection reveals itself as a decal. When you peel, you slowly see a pink banana. But it’s the LP sleeve’s inherent curiosity that sold the album to unsuspecting hippies completely unprepared for Lou Reed and John Cale’s discordant odes to heroin, sadomasochism, and the pressure of being a society girl. It’s only when you flip the LP that you get to see the band’s name. Warhol repeated the trick a few years later with the sleeve to the Rolling Stones’ Sticky Fingers, in which you peel the zipper of a pair of jeans. —K.G.

Spencer Elden was just four-months-old when his parents briefly dunked him into a swimming pool and allowed photographer Kirk Weddle to snap a few shots for the cover of Nirvana’s Nevermind. The spur-of-the-moment session happened after Kurt Cobain’s original idea of using an image of a water birth was deemed too graphic. Suspecting the image might be problematic, Cobain offered to include a sticker over the baby’s penis that read “If you’re offended by this, you must be a closet pedophile.” One of the few people to take offense was Elden himself. After years of celebrating his association with it — even getting a Nirvana tattoo on his chest — he sued the band in 2021, claiming the photograph was child pornography. Many of the original charges were thrown out, but the matter is still pending before the courts. Like many Nirvana fans, Dave Grohl finds the entire thing absurd. “Listen,” he said in 2021, “he’s got a Nevermind tattoo. I don’t.”” —A.M.

Cyndi Lauper’s thrift-store spin on old-school glamour was one of the most striking images of the early MTV era. For the cover of her debut album, she met up with Rolling Stone photographer Annie Leibvoitz on Brooklyn’s Coney Island boardwalk, looking to create something like “Jane Russell in the 1950s, with a specific South American feel.” The eye-popping use of bright, primary colors was Lauper’s idea, and she meticulously put her look together from clothes and accessories she’d found in the vintage boutique where she worked. The result was at once energetic and beautifully composed, a perfect distillation of the singer’s eclectic free spirit. When Leibovitz suggested she lift her skirt to reveal her slip, Lauper demurred. “I just felt like, ‘No, I don’t want to do that,’” Lauper recalled later. “’I want to do the strong dance-art thing.’” —J.D.

The Clash’s 1980 double album, London Calling, honored rock & roll’s sacred mission while blowing up some of its central myths. Its cover was an advertisement for that paradoxical power. The image of Paul Simonon smashing his bass was taken by photographer Pennie Smith during a 1979 show at New York’s Palladium. “I was sort of annoyed that the bouncers wouldn’t let the audience stand up out of their chairs,” Simonon explained. “So that frustrated me to the point that I destroyed this bass guitar. Unfortunately, you always sort of tend to destroy the things you love.” The script on the cover was a faithful homage to Elvis Presley’s 1956 RCA debut LP. “When the Elvis record came out, rock & roll was pretty dangerous,” Simonon told Rolling Stone years later. “And I supposed when we brought out our record, it was dangerous stuff, too.” —J.D.

Even if the name Joel Brodsky doesn’t sound familiar, the album covers he shot starting in the Sixties will be: Van Morrison’s Astral Weeks, the Doors’ The Soft Parade, Aretha Franklin’s Let Me in Your Life, and all of those sensual Ohio Players LPs feature his photography on their front. But his most in-your-face work, literally, is on Funkadelic’s Maggot Brain. Opening with its 10-minute instrumental freakout by guitarist Eddie Hazel before slipping into deceptively unhinged psychedelic R&B, the album is already pretty out-there. But Brodsky’s photo of Black model Barbara Cheeseborough (who also made history by gracing the cover of the first issue of Essence) takes the packaging to another intense level. Is she being buried alive by racism? Are maggots eating the rest of her body before making their way to her brain? All of these decades later, it’s a mystery that keeps on giving. —D.B.

Almost a decade after they’d met, Patti Smith enlisted Robert Mapplethorpe to shoot the cover of her now-classic debut album. “Robert knew where he wanted to take it, with natural light,” Smith later said. “We found the room; I knew what I wanted to wear. I rolled out of bed, put my clothes on; we ate at the Pink Tea Cup, we went to the place he wanted; he took, like, 12 pictures, and at about the eighth one, he said, “I have it.” I said, “How do you know?” and he said, “I just know.” Arista Records executives thought differently and wanted to change the artwork, worried the cover, shot in black and white with Smith in an androgynous pose, was too different from the current female singers of the time. Smith remarked, “I wasn’t thinking that I was going to break any boundaries. I just like dressing like Baudelaire.” —A.W.

Biggie’s debut album was an existential journey, and it was spelled out starkly with the album cover’s juxtaposition of a baby photo with a deeply pessimistic title. Helmed by legendary hip-hop graphic designer Cey Adams, the sparse black-and-red lettering has since become as iconic as the cover star. ”The title was so absurd that we didn’t have to hit you with these giant block letters,” Adams told Complex. “We thought we’d do something really delicate.” Despite assumptions on the contrary, the cover star was not a young Biggie nor his daughter, but a Bronx kid chosen from a modeling agency due to his likeness to the beloved MC. —C.W.

Originally, Pink Floyd wanted “something that’s really stylish, like a singular image, like a chocolate box” on the cover of The Dark Side of the Moon, as keyboardist Rick Wright told the design team Hipgnosis. One idea the Hipgnosis crew suggested was Marvel’s Silver Surfer, but the group rejected it. Then Hipgnosis’ Aubrey “Po” Powell found an image of a glass paperweight spreading rainbows around a room and showed it to his business partner, photographer Storm Thorgerson. “Storm looked at me and said, ‘I’ve got it: a prism. It’s all about Pink Floyd and their light show,’” Powell recalled. “In the early years, they were all about their light shows; nobody knew who they were.” They sketched it out, showed it to the band, and subsequently made one of the Seventies’ most iconic and intriguing images. (Incidentally, guitar virtuoso Joe Satriani got Marvel to agree to let the Silver Surfer for his Surfing With the Alien album in 1987 … until recently.) —K.G.

With the hippie dream officially deferred, America’s utopian psychedelic party band turned inward, cynical, and claustrophobic. Their fifth album, There’s a Riot Goin’ On, was dark, disillusioned, and explicitly political, but Sly Stone insisted his stark red-white-and-black remake of the American flag on the cover was made from an idealistic place. “I wanted the flag to truly represent people of all colors. I wanted the color black because it is the absence of color. I wanted the color white because it is the combination of all colors. And I wanted the color red because it represents the one thing that all people have in common: blood,” he said. “Betsy Ross did the best she could with what she had. I thought I could do better.” —C.W.

John, Paul, George, and Ringo spent the summer of 1969 making Abbey Road, and they knew it was a masterpiece. They joked about calling it Everest, and maybe flying out to the Himalayas for the photo. But as you can see in Get Back, the Fabs weren’t in the best shape to travel thousands of miles together. So they went for the simplest possible option: just crossing the street, right outside their recording studio. It took only 10 minutes, with photographer Ian McMillan. But it’s the ultimate Beatles portrait: a sunny day in London, a crosswalk, the world’s four most confident young men walking in line. They’re all peacocking: John in white, Ringo in black, Paul barefoot (and out of step), George all blue denim. Yet it’s a beautiful moment of come-together unity. It also made Abbey Road the most famous street in England, a tourist destination for fans to walk in the Beatles’ footsteps. —R.S.

There’s an uncanniness to the jagged, unpredictable angles on the cover of Joy Division’s debut album, Unknown Pleasures. Is it a mountain range? A graphical representation of brain waves? Why does it look so bleak? The mystery draws you in, and when you put the record on, with its bass-heavy atmospherics and frontman Ian Curtis’ overwhelming angst, the image makes a little more sense. The band’s guitarist Bernard Sumner found the artwork’s peaks and valleys while leafing through The Cambridge Encyclopedia of Astronomy. The image is a graphical representation of a pulsar, officially named CP1919. Designer Peter Saville reversed the color scheme to make it white on black. He left off the band’s name and the album title, making it all the more curious and able to transcend the music into the mainstream. The image has become an icon similar to The Dark Side of the Moon’s prism, but it represents so much more: goth mysticism, post-punk defiance, stark individualism. It’s now almost commonplace on T-shirts, in movies, and as parodies (Jaws anyone?). It’s a symbol for anyone wanting to show that they’re clued into something more introspective than the typical pop-culture reference. “Bernard doesn’t get nearly enough credit for that, because he couldn’t have made a better choice,” bassist Peter Hook has said. —K.G.