The 10 best album artworks of 2023
Not judging a book by its cover is a fairly essential rule of music criticism. Of everything associated with a record’s release, what covers it should be the least important element, and even the best album artwork can’t save a dud record. But, as 2023 draws to a close, it’s worth discussing how our increasingly visual age shapes how we appreciate albums now because physical media is having an undeniable renaissance.
Time is a flat circle, and HMV is back on Oxford Street. CDs and vinyl are cool again. The Beatles even released one this year, which is as good a testament as any that despite the increasing fusion of AI technology in music, we all still yearn for something we can stick on a shelf.
We see this reflected in the artistry poured into these albums’ covers, which recall a golden age when you could spot a Velvet Underground record with only a brief glance at its bright yellow banana or the brilliance of Joy Divison anytime you were confronted by wiggly white lines.
Great cover art has been a commercial tool used by everyone from Iron Maiden to Fleetwood Mac, and the musicians themselves are just as susceptible to it. Bruce Springsteen once hailed the great curiosity buy, saying he’d go into a record shop and walk home with “anything that sparks my imagination”.
Surprisingly, in the age of streaming, album artwork has become an essential extension of its artist. It reflects the mood of a record, as well as the aesthetic era it arrived in. Rightly or wrongly, the visual package is now a crucial part of releasing new material, and with that in mind, we’ve rounded up ten of the most intriguing covers of this year.
The 10 best album artworks of 2023:
10. Rat Saw God – Wednesday
Wednesday‘s Rat Saw God cover is a series of contradictions. The band are rendered in oil, dripping in Renaissance glamour and complete with a flash of chainmail. It’s regal and elegant, the total opposite of the world they create on the album – one of mundane suburban living and worn-down houses. But then you notice it’s not an actual painting but a photo of one that’s resting in a clump of mud and grass.
As Wednesday confront America’s dark underbelly by charting overdoes and unwanted pregnancy, the album art, painted by former bassist Margo Schultz, seems to mirror the sense of longing to live anywhere else. That they dream up an 18th-century portrait is a nice parallel to the lack of hope they could ever escape somewhere real.
9. Javelin – Sufjan Stevens
Sufjan Stevens‘ Javelin is accompanied by a 48-page book of art and essays reflecting the intimacy of the songwriting on the album, and collages and musings on love and loss all feature in his ode to connectivity. Stevens created the album design right down to the mass of collaged faces selected on the cover. He shared the process with fans in March as he steadily layered images on top of each other until it was a kaleidoscope of people.
The recording was a collaborative effort, with the likes of Bryce Dessner, Hannah Cohen, Pauline Delassus, and Nedelle Torrisi all featuring. Largely recorded in his home studio, the closeness of his tightknit circle weaves its way onto the cover, the photos ripped and crinkled but lovingly arranged. The title spools out in pink bubbly text, again evocating the homespun, handmade sentiment that colours the album.
8. Heavy Heavy – Young Fathers
After releasing Heavy Heavy, Young Fathers spoke at length about the importance of maintaining the strong album visuals they’ve employed since 2018’s Cocoa Sugar. “We don’t separate [its] importance because we don’t believe it’s possible to digest anything any other way,” vocalist Graham ‘G’ Hastings explained, and their fourth record was no exception.
The cover clashes warm yellows with pure black darkness as a figure writhes and creates such movement it eclipses the contrast. The deluxe editions of the album include handpainted lyrics and track titles. The band said they “wanted the type itself to embody a physical substance, texture – and to feel as if it had been painted directly onto the sleeve using contrasting layers and ink finishes.” The artwork is as evocative as their experimental rock.
7. Nakibembe Embaire Group – Nakibembe Embaire Group
When you’ve got an album that focuses on an instrument as unique as an Embaire, all you’ve got to do is showcase it. As the label, Nyege Nyege, explains, “In Nakibembe, a small village in Uganda’s Busoga kingdom (one of the country’s four remaining constitutional monarchies), locals have long reserved a communal area for musical performances and social events. In the middle of this space lies a deep pit that serves a single purpose: to amplify the embaire, an immense xylophone made up of between 15 and 25 wooden keys that stretches across the trench.”
This instrument can be played by pretty much the whole village at once if the participants are up to scratch. When this is coupled with the trippy nightlife sounds that seep into the pit with a serpentine slither of avant-garde energy, the result is a fantastically captivating record. Like Ronseal, the cover typifies this by subverting the simple presence of the instrument with the drama of monochrome and the evident nervy preamble to a performance. Stéphan Charpentier perfectly timed his shot.
6. Life Is But a Dream – Avenged Sevenfold
When Avenged Sevenfold returned after a seven-year studio album hiatus with Life Is But a Dream, they tasked outsider artist Wes Lang with creating artwork befitting the dark themes in store on the record. Anything less than a scythe-clutching reaper wouldn’t work for the cover of an album about ego death and the existential writings of Albert Camus, and that’s precisely what Lang painted.
In brutal black strokes, his vision was realised in one three-day stint. There was back and forth with the band, and Lang drew from snippets of songs to create the cover. There was a total symbiosis because Sevenfold had created ‘Nobody’ after being inspired by one of Lang’s pieces. The band’s attunement to Lang’s dark style made it the perfect artistic match.
5. Holy Joe’s Coral Island Medicine Show – The Coral
Who is this man, and what is his story? In bleak rain and shrouding fog, a trench-coated gentleman strides towards a radio station. Armed with not a guitar but a briefcase, there is more to this fellow than meats the eye. In his wake trails a tale that stretches far beyond the frame of a 12 inches of vinyl sleeving and exudes allure like Edward Hopper at his best.
This intrigue draws you towards the murder ballads and candle-lit duets contained therein. It’s a come hither cover akin to a neon light spied down a side street. Brilliantly crafted by the band’s own Ian Skelly, this sleeve breathes life into the music, making it a little drizzly, out-of-town world unto itself. With a similar aesthetic to Bob Dylan’s paintings, there’s timeless, B-movie beauty to Holy Joe’s Coral Island Medicine Show.
4. Ax Ox – Gnoomes
Exiled Russian band Gnoomes create a weird world with their sound, and Ax Ox whipped this into one of our records of the year. The album art follows suit in style. What is this cover, and what sort of creature bore it? That’s a question intriguing enough to draw you into the swirling washing machine of Gnoomes’ sound. The cover might not convey much about the genre that awaits you, but the surrealism is enough of a hint.
“In our opinion, this album could be a psychedelic musical about growing up and living in post-Soviet Russia,” the band’s Sasha Piankov said of the album. “If you watched (Adam Curtis’ documentary series) Traumazone, it’s not complicated really to imagine the visual part of the musical!” With this, there is suddenly slightly more clarity to the quirky cover and its decidedly subverted absurdist.
3. Portals – Melanie Martinez
Aesthetic eras have always driven Melanie Martinez, and the cover of Portals announced the poetic death of her Lolita-esque Crybaby era while seamlessly ushering in a new one. She readied the fans attached to her old image with visuals of a graveyard that showed a mushroom etched ominously with “RIP Crybaby” months before the album’s release.
She emerges from the dead on the album cover, meditating on past life regressions as a pink, four-eyed fairy. Her newly introspective lyrics straddle the space between life and death, using this bubblegum-coloured creature to further the sense of the otherworldy. Martinez is rivalled only by similar female indie artists like Marina and Lana Del Rey in her ability to mirror her music in album artwork, and her conceptual cover remains one of the most unique of the year.
2. Sotto Voce – Claire Deak
The world that Claire Deak creates on Sotto Voce is a dense web of mysticism. She swirls over 12 instruments into an entrancing web of sound. The cover art might not seem typically fit for an album, but this record is an exception. It’s high art from top to bottom. The body looks to be in motion, and yet it is that which we can clearly see, while the still-seeming head is obfuscated in a blur.
Created by the enigmatic R. Keane, this startling illustration carries both weighty emotion and a deep sense of mystery. Why is the sense of motion out of kilter? Is that the sea we see behind? What is the outfit? And why does looking at it make you shiver? The album asks a similar assortment of questions, creating a marriage that proves entrancing.
1. Destroyer – M.A.G.S.
When Elliott Mags was describing his latest M.A.G.S. record, he said it is “about facing your fears and befriending demons, challenging unhealthy patterns and growing into who you want to become.” Nothing epitomises that mission to find light by embracing darkness more clearly than the most menacing sky the world has seen hovering over a field of rainbows.
Simply put, the image is fantastic. Cover art is, after all, a creation to be displayed in our homes, and Destroyer one welcomes that possibility eagerly. Vitally, it also looks like an album cover; if you were to see this shot elsewhere, you’d know that it yearns for the vividity of a fitting musical accompaniment. With it, Mags and his partner, Casey Nichols, have created a masterpiece. The brooding blend of light and shade that Mags and Nichols have captured is like nothing you’ve ever seen on a sleeve and yet a paragon of the genre.
