Album artwork can be just as ambitious, strange and influential as the music itself. Close-Up Culture pick out ten covers that deserve to be looked at as art in their own right.
1. Tame Impala – Currents
A hypnotic collision of movement and geometry that turns psychedelia into minimalist design.
2. Kanye West – My Beautiful Dark Twisted Fantasy
A deliberately grotesque, surreal vision of excess, desire and celebrity, with artwork by George Condo that feels closer to contemporary painting than pop packaging.
3. Miles Davis – Bitches Brew
Mati Klarwein’s psychedelic, Afrofuturist artwork is as wild and uncompromising as the music inside it.
4. Grace Jones – Nightclubbing
Jones appears almost sculptural – severe, androgynous and completely in control. More fashion editorial than album cover.
5. Talking Heads – Speaking in Tongues
Robert Rauschenberg turned the sleeve into an actual art object, creating a transparent three-dimensional design that won a Grammy for Best Recording Package.
6. Burial – Untrue
A blurred, anonymous London at night. Minimal, melancholic and instantly evocative without ever showing you the artist.
7. Fela Kuti – Zombie
Politically charged, confrontational artwork that functions almost like a piece of protest art.
8. Björk – Vulnicura
A surreal, sculptural portrait that transforms heartbreak into something physical and otherworldly.
9. SOPHIE – Oil of Every Pearl’s Un-Insides
Alien, glossy and unsettling, looking less like an album sleeve than an artefact from a future civilisation.
10. The Velvet Underground & Nico – The Velvet Underground & Nico
Andy Warhol turned a rock album into interactive pop art. It remains one of the most provocative designs in avant-garde history.
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