As the centuries-old saying goes, you should never judge an album by its cover. Here are 25 examples of amazing albums whose covers might – wrongly – put you off. Don’t let them.
1
Guns N’ Roses – ‘The Spaghetti Incident?’:
When this covers album – the band’s fifth studio LP – came out in 1993, NME called it “a bizarre mixture of swagger, nihilism and bad attitood which is as funny as it is exhilarating”. Exhilarating is not what you’d think looking at this squelchy mess – you wonder whether someone’s going to eat it, or if they already have.
2
Simon & Garfunkel – ‘Bridge Over Troubled Water’:
Forget that the NYC duo’s final album ‘Bridge Over Troubled Water’ was an utter beaut and you’d never pick it up based on its unsettling cover. Is Garfunkel stalking Simon? Is Simon trying to irritate Garfunkel by getting in his way? Why is he wearing such a toxic assembly of greens and browns? Did his mum cut his fringe? So many questions, none of them good.
3
Kanye West – ‘The Life Of Pablo’:
Kanye’s seventh album was called ‘So Help Me God’, ‘Swish’, and then ‘Waves’ before it got this name. The first impression you get of the intriguing 19-tracker is artwork you’d assume was designed by a three-year-old who’d picked out a sickly orange, gone nuts for the Copy/Paste function, and added in an image by mistake. Wait, actually guys – this is genius.
4
Yeah Yeah Yeahs – ‘Mosquito’:
“Confusing, intriguing” is how NME reacted to the New York indie trio’s fourth album in 2013. You could level only the first of those charges against its cover. It’s sensory overload – it looks like Toy Story would if it had been written and directed by a horror superduo of Ridley Scott and Stanley Kubrick.
5
Teenage Fanclub – ‘Bandwagonesque’:
Pitch-perfect, dazzling indie from the Scottish group, represented visually by a bag of dollars that looks like it was drawn on an IBM computer’s ‘Paint’ program, on a background of blaring magenta. No thanks.
6
Led Zeppelin – ‘III’
This is proof that, at the design meeting for this album’s cover, Led Zep had a lot of ideas. Well done them.
7
Manic Street Preachers – ‘The Holy Bible’:
Some people love this cover, but on first impressions there’s little about it that’d make you want to pick it up. Except for the reversed Rs, obviously. Those are fun.
8
Yung Lean – ‘Unknown Memory’:
The Swedish sadboy rapper was just 18 when he put this impressive debut album out – but it looks like a cross between a metal record and the soundtrack for the Final Fantasy videogame series.
9
David Bowie – ‘Hours…’:
Bowie didn’t put many a foot wrong, but the cover for this 21st album is a lot: massive-collared, long-haired Bowie cradling a shirt-wearing, short-haired Bowie in the middle of a maelstrom of colour information and typography. It was released in 1999, so you can forgive most of it.
10
Animal Collective – ‘Strawberry Jam’
The seventh album by the Baltimore pop experimentalists was idiosyncratic as they come. The cover was not.
11
Dwaves – ‘Blood Guts And Pussy’:
We’ve saved the best till last. The band’s first Sub Pop album, which ran for an exhausting 13 minutes, 7 seconds, combined bitter humour with as much offense as possible. It was completely punk, but the artwork was branded so offensive that many people wouldn’t listen to it. Shame.