Top 50 Album Cover Arts I really really like
By Brandon Demmert | May 11, 2025
That's what this list is about — fifty albums that didn't just entertain me, but fundamentally shifted how I understand what cover art can do. These aren't necessarily the "best" albums ever made. They're the ones that taught me something new about flair, about emotion, about possibility. The covers that made me sit up and think: "Wait, you can do that?" Consider this my thank-you note to the albums that rewired my brain, one cover at a time.
#50. Lil Yachty – Lil Boat
Bubblegum trap with a warped cassette feel — either a joke that went too far or a vision that's still ahead of its time. Every time I think I've outgrown this album, I find myself humming "Minnesota" in the shower. Charming in spite of itself.
#49. Spinal Tap – Smell the Glove
A fictional band with real riffs and better jokes than most metal albums released the same year. The satire cuts because it hits so close. "Big Bottom" still slaps harder than it has any right to.
#48. T. Rex – Electric Warrior
Glam distilled to a primal slink: fuzz, sex, and starlight. Marc Bolan knew how to whisper in glitter. Every song feels like it's wearing eyeliner, and honestly? Same.
#47. Sonic Youth – Goo
Noise with an art degree. Every track an oil slick: beautiful, toxic, and shimmering with menace. This album taught me that guitars don't have to sound like guitars, and neither does rock music.
#46. DJ Shadow – Endtroducing.....
Built entirely from samples, yet feels like it was exhumed from buried memory. A turntablist requiem — patient, dusty, perfect. The musical equivalent of finding someone else's photo album and getting lost in their life.
#45. Tyler, the Creator – Flower Boy
A coming-out letter folded into a blooming, synth-draped statement. The rage curdles into beauty. I've watched Tyler grow from shock-rap provocateur to this, and it still gives me chills.
#44. The Notorious B.I.G. – Ready to Die
Brooklyn mythology and death drive in one smooth, terrifying package. The voice of hunger, charm, and doom. Biggie could make a grocery list sound like scripture.
#43. Grace Jones – Nightclubbing
The most fashionable threat in music history. Grace stares you down, dares you to dance, and wins. There's no arguing with this level of cool — you just surrender.
#42. Arctic Monkeys – AM
What if a dive bar jukebox only played Black Sabbath and Dr. Dre? The answer is leather-jacketed sleaze rock you can text your ex to. I've made several bad decisions to this album, and I'd make them again.
#41. SZA – S.O.S.
R&B therapy for the hyper-online. Genre-splicing, deeply flawed, and deeply human. This is what it sounds like when someone puts their Twitter drafts folder to music, and I mean that as the highest compliment.
#40. Mac Miller – Watching Movies With the Sound Off
A psychedelic excavation of a soul in real-time. His most spaced-out, spaced-in, and vulnerable work — and still his most cinematic. Listening to it now feels like reading someone's diary right before a major breakthrough.
#39. Kanye West – My Beautiful Dark Twisted Fantasy
A maximalist meltdown dressed as a comeback. Gorgeous, grotesque, and god-tier in the worst and best ways. The last album he made before I had to start separating the art from the artist with industrial-grade equipment.
#38. Black Flag – TV Party (EP)
Slacker-core before anyone admitted how good the couch felt. "We're gonna have a TV party tonight" still hits like a punchline and a prophecy. The anthem for everyone who's ever chosen Netflix over human contact.
#37. Bob Dylan – The Freewheelin' Bob Dylan
The archetype of protest folk, though it's the heartbreakers that age best. He wasn't a prophet yet, but he was already carrying a knife. Don't let the harmonica fool you — these songs have teeth.
#36. David Bowie – Aladdin Sane
Glam on the verge of a breakdown. Less a sequel to Ziggy than a scorched-earth solo in cracked makeup. The piano on the title track still sounds like it's falling down a spiral staircase.
#35. Yoko Ono – Season of Glass
Recorded weeks after Lennon's murder — it's raw, messy, and too intimate for comfort. That cover photo isn't symbolic. It's evidence. Everyone who says Yoko can't make music hasn't heard her scream on this album.
#34. The Clash – London Calling
A punk band decides to play every genre and somehow pulls it off. Still the most generous, furious double album ever made. The musical equivalent of showing up to class having done none of the assigned reading but acing the exam anyway.
#33. Madvillain – Madvillainy
MF DOOM and Madlib conjure a dense, shortwave signal from another rap dimension. Blunted, brilliant, and allergic to filler. Your favorite rapper's favorite album.
#32. King Crimson – In the Court of the Crimson King
Prog rock's haunted mansion — all mellotron tapestries and jazz-knuckle drums. This is what Tolkien would have listened to if he dropped acid. That album cover still shows up in my nightmares sometimes.
#31. Ani DiFranco – Up Up Up Up Up Up
Intensely personal without ever begging sympathy. Her guitar slaps, her politics sting, and her voice cuts like it's trying to leave a mark. The soundtrack to every feminist awakening in a college dorm room.
#30. Cream – Disraeli Gears
Psychedelic blues distilled into neon sludge. Clapton's tone is nuclear, but it's Jack Bruce's voice that holds the trip together. The album that launched a thousand guitar store employees.
#29. Gorillaz – Demon Days
Pop music from a collapsed civilization. Cartoon band? Sure. But this record was dead serious about the future we were walking into. Turns out Damon Albarn could see 2020 coming all the way back in 2005.
#28. N.W.A – Straight Outta Compton
Raw and righteous. Still sounds like a boot kicked through the front door of the music industry. The album that terrified suburban parents and created a million terrible imitators.
#27. Black Sabbath – Master of Reality
Riffs dropped so low they practically burrowed into the soil. Doom's Genesis, and still the stoniest record ever made. If you've ever worn black on black on black, you owe this album a royalty check.
#26. Ramones – Ramones
Everything you need to start a band: 1, 2, 3, 4. Dumb brilliance that burned the house down with a grin. Fourteen songs in 29 minutes — economy should always be this thrilling.
#25. Sade – Love Deluxe
Smooth enough for a spa, deep enough for a breakdown. Her voice could make a breakup feel like a luxury item. The album equivalent of expensive perfume on hotel sheets.
#24. The White Stripes – De Stijl
Two people, one drum kit, a mid-century design ethos, and no fear. Before the fame, the White Stripes were just plain weird — and perfect. Jack hadn't discovered his blues-lawyer persona yet; Meg hadn't discovered the exit.
#23. My Bloody Valentine – Loveless
Not an album — a vapor. Guitars blur into something biological. Once it sinks in, you'll hear it in everything. Cost so much to make that it literally bankrupted their label, and honestly? Worth every penny.
#22. Justice – Cross
French electro turned into a satanic disco. Feels like Daft Punk got mugged by a biker gang and handed a Roland Juno. The distortion on this album is so crunchy you could serve it with milk.
#21. Vampire Weekend – Only God Was Above Us
They got older, got darker, and got weird. The only 2020s rock album brave enough to sound like 2001 in all the wrong — and right — ways. Ezra Koenig turned his anxiety about climate collapse into something unnervingly catchy.
#20. Dr. Dre – The Chronic
Built like a lowrider: slow, smooth, and unapologetically engineered to shake your rearview. G-Funk didn't just change hip-hop — it changed what a beat could feel like. Still the best album to test new speakers with.
#19. Tame Impala – Currents
Kevin Parker rewires psych-rock into breakup disco and loses his mind along the way. Every track is a mirror — reflective, distorted, and a little too honest. The sound of someone realizing they're the problem.
#18. Queen – Queen II
The moment the crown was forged. Camp, chaos, and myth, wrapped in studio trickery and delivered with a smirk. "Ogre Battle" still hits like a knight swinging an amp. The album where Mercury fully embraced his inner theater kid.
#17. OutKast – Stankonia
A double-headed monster: one half future-funk prophet, the other half Southern rap trickster. Unhinged, unfiltered, undeniable. Atlanta became the center of the hip-hop universe with this album, and it hasn't surrendered the title since.
#16. Miles Davis – Bitches Brew
It doesn't ask for your attention — it demands your surrender. Jazz rock as séance. Controlled chaos on a cosmic leash. The musical equivalent of watching someone perform surgery on themselves.
#15. The Velvet Underground & Nico – The Velvet Underground
Too soft for the punks, too ugly for the hippies. And yet here it is, still whispering secrets through the floorboards of indie music. Only sold 30,000 copies in its first five years, but everyone who bought it started a band.
#14. Charlie XCX – Brat
In 2025 more than enough has been said about Brat.
#13. Rage Against the Machine – Rage Against the Machine
Funk-metal as Molotov cocktail. Every riff's a riot, every lyric a bullhorn. Still burns, even if half the fans missed the point. The only political science textbook you can mosh to.
#12. Judas Priest – British Steel
Shaved metal into hooks, leather into armor. The birth of mainstream heavy metal, with riffs so precise you could forge tools on them. Rob Halford's voice could shatter bulletproof glass.
#11. Funkadelic – Maggot Brain
The title track alone deserves its own religion. Guitar as grief, funk as chaos, gospel as psych. An American dirge disguised as a soul record. Eddie Hazel's solo sounds like what dying must feel like.
#10. Wilco – Yankee Hotel Foxtrot
Alt-country gets dismantled in real-time. Radio static, fragile hooks, and midwestern alienation build an album that sounds like heartbreak during a firmware update. Jeff Tweedy turned his migraine into your catharsis.
#9. Ol' Dirty Bastard – Return to the 36 Chambers: The Dirty Version
A human cartoon, a walking disaster, and a divine poet of chaos. ODB slurs, screams, and stumbles his way into genius. Hip-hop needed this mess. The Wu-Tang member most likely to steal your wallet and then help you look for it.
#8. Bruce Springsteen – Born in the U.S.A.
An arena record disguised as a workers' dirge. Synths glimmer, drums explode, and Bruce howls into the neon wasteland. The most misunderstood protest album in American history. Reagan's team really thought this was patriotic? Did they even listen to the words?
#7. The Beatles – Abbey Road
The swan song before the fall. Side A is pop perfection, but Side B is the real revelation — a symphonic stitchwork that wraps up a mythology before it collapses under its own brilliance. The last album they recorded together, and you can hear them knowing it's over.
#6. Daft Punk – Random Access Memories
A disco ball funeral for analog dreams. Machines aching to be human, and succeeding for 74 minutes. Retro-futurism has never felt this full of heart. The robots finally cried.
#5. The Beatles – The White Album
A band breaking up on tape — and somehow reinventing rock in the process. Every track a different mood swing, every silence charged with tension. Their messiest album, their most human. The sound of four geniuses getting sick of each other but still making magic.
#4. Nirvana – Nevermind
Grunge wasn't supposed to go platinum. But this one did, and it still stings. Clean, loud, anthemic, and deeply uncomfortable with its own fame. Kurt Cobain wrote pop songs then tried to smother them with distortion, but they were too strong to die.
#3. Joy Division – Unknown Pleasures
Music that sounds like a haunted building. Sparse, cold, and pulsing with dread — a blueprint for post-punk, goth, and how to turn despair into design. Ian Curtis turned his epilepsy into a dance move and his depression into poetry.
#2. Pink Floyd – The Dark Side of the Moon
A philosophical mixtape disguised as a stadium epic. Every heartbeat, clock chime, and lyric engineered to hit you in the softest part of your brain. Still baffling that something this weird sold 45 million copies.
#1. Kendrick Lamar – To Pimp a Butterfly
A full-length reckoning. Jazz, funk, G-funk, spoken word, therapy, and theology — all housed in a major label release that plays like a gospel opera in freefall. Kendrick doesn't just make songs, he maps contradictions: black excellence and trauma, ego and erasure, survival and spectacle. "I remember you was conflicted" loops like a prayer, a threat, a thesis. Every track swings between anger, joy, paranoia, and transcendence. It changed how I heard rap. Then it changed how I listened to America. Then it changed how I listened to myself.
🕯️ Honorable Mention: The Beatles – Yesterday and Today (Butcher Cover Edition)
The dismembered dolls and raw meat weren't a joke — they were a rupture. The most punk thing The Beatles ever did (even if they took it back). You can draw a line from this cover to Cannibal Corpse, Carcass, Municipal Waste, and every other band that turned revulsion into iconography. The music? Fine. The statement? Legendary.
30 EPs That Still Feel Like Lightning in a Bottle
By Brandon Demmert | May 11, 2025
In Alaska, we had KRBD. And, my friends ran rogue radio shows on KRBD. Friday nights became a ritual. After the sun dipped, I'd turn that knob into their sets with gusto — punk records, rap, weird electronic stuff that sounded like secret messages. That feeling — magic — discovering something raw and essential when you least expect it — built from the ground up. This is a tribute to those moments: thirty EPs that still feel like finding a new station in the dark. No polish, no algorithm. Just thirty flashes of noise, sweat, and lightning we couldn't let go. Thanks for tuning in. And welcome to the noise.
Proto-Genius:
The Rolling Stones – Five by Five
Before they became the biggest band in the world, the Stones were just a bunch of kids tearing through Chicago blues. Five by Five feels like a sweaty handshake between London and the South Side. A blast of sweaty, raw blues recorded at Chess Studios, Five by Five captures the Stones just as they're figuring out they're dangerous. Covers and early originals slam into each other like kids stealing cars. Proto-Stones at their cockiest. Imperfect in the best way. Rock music learning how to swagger.
Alice in Chains – Jar of Flies
Laid down in just a few days, Jar of Flies stripped Alice in Chains down to their soft, rotting core. Acoustic guitars, vocal harmonies, and quiet despair swirl together like cigarette smoke in a dark room. Proof you can whisper louder than you can scream. The first EP to hit No. 1 on the Billboard 200. Grunge's saddest victory lap. A grunge band accidentally invents "sadcore" while unplugged — beautiful, broken, and Billboard-topping. It's the rare acoustic EP that hits harder than any distortion pedal.
Meshuggah – I
One 21-minute track that hits like a thousand collapsing factories. I is prog, it's djent, it's pure weaponized disorientation, near endless existential dread and its Djent's Big Bang... Nobody else even tried to match it. No breaks. No escape. If "bleak math homework" could melt your face, this would be it.
EPs I've heard on the radio in that Strange little City
TV on the Radio – Young Liars
Young Liars feels like waking up hungover in the backseat of a dream. Gospel, noise, and ghost-story synths bleeding together in the Brooklyn heat. It's scrappy but celestial. Everything indie rock wished it could be in 2003. A mixtape for a post-9/11 world collapsing under its own anxiety. Young Liars juggles fuzzed-out gospel, broken romance, and apocalyptic synths in 17 dizzying minutes. It's Brooklyn indie before it became a branding exercise. There's still smoke in its lungs.
Fleet Foxes – Sun Giant
Fleet Foxes' harmonies hit here at full power, a golden wash of light that feels too delicate for this world. It's a small record with cathedral-sized ambition. There's more pure sunlight per second on Sun Giant than most albums manage in an hour. Pastoral, radiant, and impossibly earnest. Robin Pecknold's voice could make a grocery list sound like a folk hymn. If dew had a sound, it would be this — harmonies you can practically smell, all crammed into a breezy EP. Essential springtime listening.
Continue reading all 30 EPs in our full article...