Top 10 Album Covers

For this next “Aesthetic” post, Blogger Jake Sonderman incorporated his passion for music and compiled a list of his 10 favorite album covers.

By Jake Sonderman

This is a list of my top 10 album covers of all time. I did not take into account the album’s popularity or musical content, only how much I like to look at the cover art. 

10. Iron Maiden – Piece of Mind

Iron Maiden is the only major band that comes to my mind that has a character on every single album cover. Steve Harris, the bassist and founding member, says the character comes from a mask they used to call “the head,” and they’re British so it was like, “the ed,” and they started calling the mask Eddie. There is even a video game built around Eddie. 

9. The Who – Who’s next

A monolith and destruction for miles. This apocalyptic cover is simple. If you look closely, the guys are zipping up their shorts, and there are stains on the monolith. I’m not sure exactly what the message is, but man that is a cool cover. 

8.  Beastie Boys – Licensed to Ill

Of course, when you first look at this album you only see the front side. This is a clean and pristine lookin’ tail of a plane, pretty cool on its own. Then you flip it over to the plane crashing on the back side. The front is cool, but the connection to the surprising, chaotic back makes this a top 10. 

7. Red Hot Chili Peppers – Californication

This album cover takes a bit of unpacking. For a while I thought the pool was lava because I never gave it more than a glance. The pool is really the sky during a sunset, and the sky is more obviously the water. The message is simply how backwards life in California is. 

6. Led Zeppelin – Houses of the Holy

Despite what many say, this is not a bunch of kids in blonde wigs. This mysterious album cover meant to mimic Arthur C. Clarke’s novel Childhood’s End was photographed multiple times with two blonde children, at sunrise and sunset. Truly genius.

5. Janelle Monáe: Dirty Computer

I couldn’t find a ton of backstory on this art, but I really like it. The color scheme is intoxicating, and every little detail pops out. It’s almost like when I look at it I have to back up and open my eyes more to really take it in. 

4. Joy Division – Unknown Pleasures

This is arguably the most iconic album cover of all time, but that’s not why I chose it. For a long time people speculated where this album art, seen on millions of t-shirts, came from (before the internet). Bernard Sumner from Joy Division found this image in the Manchester Central Library. He was searching for inspiration, and found this image in the The Cambridge Encyclopaedia of Astronomy. It was the “stacked plots” of the radio emissions of a rotating neutron star. 

3. Pink Floyd – Ummagumma

This album was designed by popular English design company, Hipgnosis. They’ve designed album covers for more famous rock bands than any other design company, and this is my favorite art that they’ve done. The more I look at this cover the more I discover. If you look closely, in each “picture inside a picture” the bandmates have switched positions. This might be because the album is a combination of songs written by the individual band members. 

2. Motley Crue – Too Fast For Love

In case you didn’t already figure it out, this is a very clever copy of the Rolling Stones’s album cover art for Sticky Fingers. This is truly the album cover for all of 80s rock: all leather, studs, and spikes. 

1. The Clash – London Calling 

I’m not sure anybody but Evan would agree with me on this one, but this is truly a masterful album cover. So much so that people know this album cover better than the album cover it is imitating. This is a play on Elvis Presley’s name album from 1956, but instead of playing his guitar like Elvis’s cover, Paul Simonon is smashing his bass. Truly Punk. 

Aesthetics Editor: Elizabeth Shay