The Best Rock Album Covers of All Time

Nothing beats a great album cover. Well, OK, maybe some things do (sex, videos of surfboarding dogs, videos of surfboarding sex dogs), but a great album cover is still a thing to be treasured. At their best, amazing album covers can influence a whole area of artistic endeavor while encapsulating everything about a certain band, artist or idea. Here are the 5 best album covers of all time, in terms of epoch-shaking design:

Dark Side of the Moon (Pink Floyd)

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Oh come on, DSoM was obviously going to be on here. How could it not be? The image is iconic: alone in blackness, a single prism refracts the light of a laser into a burning rainbow of colors – the promise of prog-style psychedelic madness and so much more. Storm Thorgerson’s influential design inspired a million imitators, entered the public consciousness and ensured that kids from now until the end of time will be pulling that funky-looking album down off the shelves and giving it a play. And, because this is the Floyd and Thorgerson, every inch of that cover symbolizes something dashingly intellectual. Not bad, eh?

The Man Machine (Kraftwerk)

As revolutionary as everything the band themselves did, the artwork for Kraftwerk’s seminal 1978 album is a master class in how to create brilliance with a severely limited colour palette. Stood in a row, the four band member’s gaze, robot-like, off into the distance; proving once and for all that you can be a member of the hottest band in the whole of Germany and still look like a certified accountant. Yet the image is just about perfect in every way: striking, understated, faintly comical and very Kraftwerk.

London Calling (The Clash)

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An old black and white stage photo that isn’t quite in focus, a homage to Elvis Presley’s debut album… the third studio album by punk rock legends The Clash shows beyond a doubt that sometimes less is more. What’s particularly striking to a modern audience is how prescient it all is: the ‘borrowed’ writing is at home with the punk ethos, but more reflects the modern retro craze – a wonderful re-purposing of a stone-cold classic. Q magazine rated this one of the top ten album covers of all time in 2001, and it’s easy to see why. It helps, too, that the album is inarguably one of the greatest records ever pressed in Britain.

Blue Monday (New Order)

There are about a trillion New Order album covers that could have featured on this list, but we’re going to plump for Blue Monday. Designed to resemble a floppy disc and completely devoid of either the band’s name or the name of the song, Blue Monday is legendary among music aficionados – and not just for its incredible design. Thanks to Tony Wilson’s frighteningly incompetent mismanagement of Factory Records, the label and the band lost 5p on every copy of the original single sold. Luckily, the 1988 re-release featured a cheaper and equally visually-arresting sleeve that this time netted the band some actual money.

Anything by the Smiths

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He may have long ago gone off the deep end and sailed away into obnoxious trolling of the media, but there’s no arguing that early-80s Morrissey was a devilishly talented man. And not just where writing miserable lyrics was concerned: he personally oversaw the designs of each Smiths album, single and compilation release, creating a body of sleeve artwork unmatched by any band before or since. The concept is simple: choose a striking frame or photograph of some pop culture hero or British film and replace the original colors with a single, muted tone. The result is a series of sleeves that consistently look fantastic and instantly identify the record in question as a product of Mozza’s imagination.