Album covers – The Concordian

Concordia students and artists talk about their favourite album covers.

When we envision the sound of a particular album, one of the first things we might think of is its visuals. This can take the shape of a music video from a loved track, or a themed photoshoot from the album rollout. In most cases, the vivid image we might have of an album comes from its cover.

The square shape that forms an album cover is often open-ended when it comes to its artistic perception. Be it a simple portrait or an intricate painting, a meticulous collage or a straightforward photograph, music artwork holds a necessary relationship with the sound of the music project itself.

For instance, Childish Gambino’s album 3.15.20 (2020) is seen either as a solid white-filled square or a blank cover. Either way, this minimalist and nonchalant approach doesn’t necessarily lessen the quality and weight of the project that was released unannounced. One could argue that it lets the listener create their own colours by not being influenced beforehand by any imagery.

Yasmine is a first-year student in communications studies and she relishes in The Angel You Don’t Know by Amaarae (2020). She finds the cover to be very weird—cool illustrations like big eyes and written bodies featuring flashy colours. To her, it looks like an invitation for a magnetic sonic experience that’s so captivating that she added the album to her library even before listening to it. “[The] super sick illustrations speak for the song themselves so you can just look at the cover and connect those two,” Yasmine said.

As for Simone, a student in photography, Marvin Gaye’s I Want You (1976) cover holds a special place in their heart. “It makes me want to dance and lean against the one I love,” they said. Indeed, the figures in the painting seem deeply in motion, present, and engulfed in the music. The songs on Gaye’s album directly affect the movement of the body and whenever Simone listens to it, she can imagine herself among others, “loving and yearning.” For Simone, dim lighting, a cigarette and a drink on a table close by is the perfect fit for her album.

Windswept Adan by Ichiko Aoba (2020) is Sylvia’s pick. A first-year scenography student in the theatre department, she finds the cover to be reflective of the album’s instrumentals and organic sounds. “[The cover seems] very freeing and feminine to me, which I also really love and resonate with,” Sylvia explained. In her eyes, the sparkly and magical cover perfectly summarizes the world of the album, enhancing its dreamy sound with such a hazy filter.

Lindsay, a first-year communications student, appreciates Lorde’s Solar Power album sleeve (2021). She especially noted its interesting fish eye lens. “I love how she’s [Lorde] posed and takes up the whole frame with her legs,” Lindsay said. She also pointed out the colour palette of the cover and how it offers “a happy mood which corresponds with some of the upbeat songs in the album.”

Musicians at Concordia also had some words to say in regard to their own single and album covers. Minh Tu, under the stage alias LilMid, dabbles in a bit of everything artistic like videography and sewing and has been producing music since the age of 14.

The artist released his homemade project Stage Fright in early 2023 with the intention to tell a vulnerable story by figuratively putting himself on a “stage.” This EP’s artwork complements the messages of his songs that tell of the time Minh Tu performed in front of an audience for the first time. For the Stage Fright cover, LilMid took a blank piece of paper, drew the emotions he felt during the making of the album, cut them up, and scanned the final product for a mixed media look. He hopes to inspire people to also come out of their shells and hop on a similar figurative stage.

For Roxanne Izzo, a singer and a second-year communications student, the visuals are probably the part she loves the most about putting out music. “Even if I have yet to release a full body of work, I always strive to attach a visual concept for each of my single covers,” she said. The vision behind her recent single “What Have You Learned?” out since October 20th was to take a super glossy, airbrushed-looking image of herself and distress it so that it looks like a disintegrated poster on a wall. Despite thinking that not every single album has to be well-versed in its visual aesthetics to be thematically or musically evocative, the singer believes that album art as a whole is important because it’s all part of the physical body of work.

All and all, an album cover is the natural half of the pairing that is the main visual and the music itself. It is so powerful that even noticing an intriguing album cover in a record shop while casually browsing can lead to someone discovering a gem of an album.

Cover art is the first look you get at a body of work — might as well make it count with something eye-grabbing.

Choosing cover art to associate with a piece of music will always be a big decision for artists, as the art introduces the music. Before listening to a single second, your experience with a body of work starts with the art that accompanies it. Since it is the listener’s first contact with the music, the cover has to be intriguing enough for the listener to decide to dive into the record.

In some instances, cover art can be so eye-catching that it transcends a record’s popularity and gets even more appreciated than the album itself, becoming its own thing. Album covers such as Pink Floyd’s The Dark Side of the Moon, with the famous triangle prism and the beam of light passing through, or The Beatles’ Abbey Road which sees the band members wearing suits and crossing the street, are prime examples of this.

Don’t get me wrong — these albums are considered some of the best of all time, but having such iconic covers definitely helped them gain the status and universal praise they still get to this day. These covers became so popular over time that you can now see them on clothes, posters, mugs, and tapestries, to a point where they’re almost symbolic.

With the streaming era, where everything is compiled on your phone, album art might not feel as important as 30 years ago when people would go to their nearest record store to skim through different album covers and buy whichever one caught their attention. Regardless of the period we are in, album covers still abide by the same set of rules as before for picking good cover art.

The most important rule is that the cover art has to be representative of the music. The genre that does it best is metal music, where the violence showcased on the album art is an excellent indicator of how brutal the music is going to sound. Death metal outfit Cannibal Corpse have some of the most gruesome album covers out there in metal, often picturing truly disgusting and unimaginable things done to people (look it up at your own risk) — and their very gross and murderous sound matches the vibe they portray on their front cover.

R&B also does it well, as it’s a more sexy and intimate genre, where artists don’t shy away from sensually posing on their album arts. You can take Doja Cat’s 2019 single “Juicy” as an example, a song talking about “juicy booties,” where Doja Cat herself is showcasing her butt on the cover art.

The importance of cover art should never be neglected — while at its core, music is a form of sound art, an album or song also needs visual art to represent it. Who knows, maybe that split second of looking at and judging a cool album cover might make you discover your next favourite artist.

Some of my favourite album covers includes:

Killers – Iron Maiden

In the Aeroplane Over the Sea – Neutral Milk Hotel

The House Is Burning – Isaiah Rashad

Kids See Ghosts – Kids See Ghosts

Twin Fantasy – Car Seat Headrest

Midnight Marauders – A Tribe Called Quest

Stranger in the Alps – Phoebe Bridgers

And Justice For All – Metallica

Cosmogramma – Flying Lotus

Songs In The Key Of Life – Stevie Wonder

Graphic by James Fay