When it comes to music, without a doubt, sound is key. We don’t listen to songs for their album covers—we listen because we love the melody, the lyrics, the genre, or any combination of these factors. However, even though we might listen to a song for its tune, oftentimes, the way we remember a song or an artist is through its album cover. After all, if you use an app like Apple Music or Spotify, the album cover is what you see when a song is playing, so it makes sense that the image would linger in your mind.
We associate album covers with a certain phase for a particular artist, but also with the songs on the album. As a result, when album covers catch our eye, when they force us to pause our scrolling through Spotify or Apple Music, that’s almost always a good sign, because it means that artist whose album cover it is has successfully caught our attention. Just as we’d stop to stare at a painting hanging in a museum, the album cover forces us to stop. We stare for a moment, analyze its features, and there’s this feeling—a combination of awe, wonder, excitement, and perhaps inspiration—that takes over.
For me, when I think of album covers I remember, I think of the following (note that these are definitely biased toward my personal music taste):
For me, one thing that becomes immediately apparent when looking at these four album covers is that album cover art and design varies greatly. Joji’s album cover for BALLADS 1 looks like a vintage photograph, similar to a Polaroid, whereas Daniel Caesar’s Freudian album cover looks much more like a painting. Anderson .Paak’s Malibu’s cover looks like a digital collage, and finally, Kanye’s KIDS SEE GHOSTS album cover might be the most unique of them all. It has Chinese characters, as well as cartoon-like figures that look like they’ve been drawn digitally, carefully placed in front of a watercolor-esce background.
I love the diversity in each of these approaches to designing an album cover, and although they’re images, somehow to me, the experience they provide visually feels a little like music. There’s something there that’s can’t be put into words, something that feels a little ethereal. Maybe it’s not music to my ears, but for me, it’s music to my eyes.
