The 50 Worst Album Covers of All Time

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.

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.