The Best Album Cover Designs of 2014 (So Far)

Label: Self-released

Following the release of Beautiful Pimp back in February of last year, Atlanta’s Rome Fortune returns with self-released sequel Beautiful Pimp II and recreates the artwork of the former for a refined result on the latter. If any of the covers featured on this list should be recreated as an oil painting and hung in a figurative hallway of hip-hop, this is the one.

Label: Hardly Art

If you look close enough at the cover for Tacocat’s second album, you can actually see the name of the album spelled out. No? Oh, never mind. The band’s colorful surf-rock sensibilities of "fun for fun’s sake" couldn’t be better put on a cover, and if you stare at it for long enough, you may trip literal balls.

Label: Tri-Angle Records

Sd Laika’s release via Tri-Angle Records finds itself in good company amongst labelmates Evian Christ and Forest Swords, and by "good company" I’m talking Triads, not a triathlon team. Sd Laika aka Milwaukee’s Peter Runge delves into sounds that almost border on violence to electronic music, with an assertive, thuggish, and at times challenging result; both good and evil. Hence, the very fitting, high contrast cover.

Label: Olsen
Art director: Bendik Kaltenborn

Todd Terje’s masterfully titled It’s Album Time may look familiar to the readership of The New Yorker, having enlisting the help of esteemed cartoonist and friend Bendik Kaltenborn. As the story goes, Terje and Kalternborn met around 10 years ago at a branch of the Dutch chain Free Record Shop, bonding over a shared appreciation of what Kalterborn referred to as "crazy nonsense stupid humor." One decade later and behold: It’s Album Time.

Label: Young Gods Records
Art directors: Bob Biggs and Michael Gira

The story of the cover(s) for To Be Kind also starts with a friendship spanning many years, this time between Swans’ Mike Gira and conceptual artist Bob Biggs. "I recall asking Bob in 1981 or so if I could use one of those baby images for a record, and he said, definitively, NO," said Gira in an interview with Pitchfork. "But those images have remained in the back of my head since then, always nagging. It seems they’re always calling me, calling, calling...
 I’m delighted that these images, finally with Bob’s consent, can now act as innocent, but implacable sentinels for the music." The result, as he put it, is the "uncanny visual cipher" providing the release’s overall aesthetic, and we’re inclined to agree.

Label: Warner
Art director: Autumn de Wilde

She of Rilo Kiley fame, Jenny Lewis, returns after six years in a blazer of glory, with a solo album boasting contributions from Ryan Adams and Beck and an indisputably cool cover to boot. Even though The Voyager isn’t available yet, we would feel amiss not including it.

Label: 4AD
Art director: Andreas Waldschuetz

Considering how cinematic the image for SOHN's Tremors is, I feel a trick may have been missed in not having posters plastered around with the tagline "Sohn: Soon" in the time leading up to the album’s release. Still, the London-born producer’s soulful outings over sparse electronic landscapes work nicely as you book and subsequently enjoy your holiday to one of Austria’s many beautiful mountainside resorts.

Label: Rock Action
Illustrator: DLT

With possible inspiration drawn from the contents of an ancient (read: the '70s) geometry textbook, illustrator DLT generated hypnotic graphics for Mogwai’s equally hypnotic brand of noise rock, featured in abundance on their latest album Rave Tapes, which was released at the beginning of the year.

Label: Top Dawg/Interscope
Art directors: Vlad Sepetov and Renata Raksha

Perhaps the highest profile release featured on this list, "Man of the Year" ScHoolboy Q put out his powerful, critically acclaimed mission statement of an album in the form of Oxymoron earlier this year; becoming the second member of Black Hippy to release their commercial debut with Interscope, following Kendrick Lamar's good kid, m.A.A.d city.

Label: Tru Thoughts
Art director: Altmark Creative

The splendor of a sunset simultaneously collides and collaborates with the neon-lit eye magnet bearing the title of Quantic’s latest album Magnetica—a fairly representative way of hinting at how the same occurs sonically on the album itself. Quantic conjures timeless, worldly sounds through a modern day framework of electronic fission.

Label: Ninja Tune

At first, Illum Sphere’s debut album sort of looks as though it’s an homage to The Fly with a haunting figure emerging from an electrified chamber. And while I doubt the UK producer/Hoya:Hoya founder Ryan Hunn had the 1986 blockbuster in mind, the album showcases the label-owner’s own mutated electronic experimentations as though it were—flitting and buzzing impatiently between genres and ideas throughout his first solo outing as Illum Sphere.

Label: Def Jam
Art director: Romare Bearden Foundation/Licensed by VAGA, New York, NY

The only posthumous piece of cover art to be featured on the list, revered artist Romare Bearden’s collage Pittsburgh Memory—sampled whole for the LP’s cover—sets the scene for the group’s satirical reflections on stereotypes and violence in America today.

Label: Modern Love
Art director: Barry Lewis

Another piece of album artwork arguably steeped in a subtext of social commentary, Millie & Andrea (aka Miles Whittaker and Andy Stott) paint an unconventional portrait of street life on their debut album release. The pair take an unconventional approach in capturing jungle and jacking house and juke, bundling them into a white van, roughing them up a bit, taking their wallets, and chucking them out at the lights before speeding away.

Label: Nonesuch
Art director: Michael Carney

Arguably the most eye-catching of the bunch, as well as the most fun to look at while cross-eyed, the design for The Black Keys' eighth album was a contribution from drummer Patrick Carney’s brother Michael, born from the former’s interest in mind control.

Label: Future Classic
Art director: tin&ed

It's a big hand for the first full-length release from Australia’s newfound bearded hero of pop. The eagerly awaited album sways between strong and soulful strides and fractured, at times vulnerable contemplations on personal experiences.

Label: Anti
Art directors: Antoine Carlier and Marie Planeille

The sixth album from the Grammy Award-winning group of Tuareg musicians was recorded Joshua Tree, Calif., and that sun-warped, sand-blasted, psychedelic effect of swirling guitars, percussions, and vocals really comes through. If The Sopranos were to be remade in the Sahara, this would be the soundtrack (and the album cover).

Label: Hyperdub
Art directors: Shanzhai Biennial and Asger Carlsen

Fatima Al Qadiri’s debut album for Hyperdub is a stunning opening statement, formed around her perspective of Chinese culture from a detached Western point of view. From the doll-like figure on the front to the skewed Asian motifs found on the album itself, Asiatisch contains a carefully forged collection of music.

Label: Keysound Recordings
Art directors: John Coulthart and Nico Hogg

This introductory LP from up-and-coming producer Wen is a seductively dark invitation into the sounds that pervade some of London’s grimiest postcodes. Illumination amongst the concrete couldn’t be put better—we strongly recommend you follow the signals and lock in. 

Label: Warp Records
Art director: Eric Studer

Plaid's Reachy Prints marks 25 years of output for the British electronic duo, and it is also their 10th studio album. Created in collaboration with installation artist Eric Studer, the extraordinary X-ray image aims to represent a personal reflection after a radical experience.

Label: Ed Banger Records
Art Director: Jean André

Cutting, pasting, ripping, and scratching all fall into familiar territory for one of France’s foremost hip-hop producers. How fitting it is, then, to have a carefully crafted collage of travel stubs (bonus points for the "easyjet" stub which reads "ed rec"), likely from traveling to play parties the world over, meanwhile managing to piece together a great album—a flight to party town with stop-offs in Chicago, Baltimore, New York, Paris, and Berlin.

Label: Real World Records

The sepia-hued cover for the contemporary Irish music supergroup’s eponymous album harks back to a time of old to full effect. While your Gaelic may be a bit rusty, the group’s folk fusions are worth a listen still.

Label: Hemlock

That sinking feeling you’re experiencing might be the time you remembered accidentally destroying your grandma’s prized porcelain plates while playing around with grandpa’s gold clubs (relax, I was like 5), or you might already be listening to Untold’s Black Light Spiral LP. His claustrophobic and destructive patterns assemble like a pile of broken, jagged shards on the (dance)floor.

Label: Warp Records
Art director: Robert Beaty

Not to get too existential on you guys, but one really could spend hours pondering the futility of existence after staring at this instance of Robert Beaty’s artwork for long enough. Released specially as part of this year’s Record Store Day celebrations, Oneohtrix Point Never’s experimental songs on Commissions I definitely have an appropriate visual counterpart.

Label: Nature Sounds
Art director: Joseph Martinez

Going simple is sometimes best in getting a point across, and there is, as they say, no place like home. So first place goes to Blu’s latest album, arriving just in time for the summer, too. Joseph Martinez recreates an image of gang members throwing signs while a police officer happily obliges to capture the moment, instead capturing a disparity between this situation and how reality normally plays out.