The Importance of Album Art in Understanding Music

 by Isaac Mead

Whilst many do not find themselves flipping through records/CDs nowadays in a music shop and physically examining albums to see what jumps out to us, an album cover can offer a glimpse into the narrative and type of music an album will contain. Covers have the ability to recontextualize a song through the visual language that they offer, which gives them the opportunity to change how a listener can perceive and view a song.

Artwork accompanying an album can bridge the gap between artist and listener by communicating their vision in a different format, but has the introduction of digital music streaming reduced the cover of an album to simply a formality? There is a large contrast between the tangibility of holding a vinyl record and looking at the eccentricities of its sleeve, and the small thumbnail that a cover is now reduced to on streaming services such as Apple Music or Spotify. Today, especially in popular music, the emphasis on the album as a collective piece has shifted to a focus on singles. As expected, these singles will often not hold any particular artistic value and so the cover will most likely feature whatever is perceived to be trendy at the time and sell the most. The downfall of this is that trends pass and in hindsight many of said covers will appear dated and all rather similar. Despite many of these ‘temporary’ covers, many timeless examples of album artwork exist that are synonymous with the music they contain.

Take Radiohead’s entire discography as an example; every album conveys a different visual language and yet all bar the first were produced by artist Stanley Donwood. With every album cycle Donwood became more of an intrinsic part of trying to represent the music produced and conveying who the band are at the given moment in time. Their widely acclaimed album ‘OK Computer’ released in 1997 is a good case of how colour schemes and illustrations can reflect the tone of the music itself. The cold, white colour scheme and motifs of a ‘lost child’ convey a bleak and terrifying future in a mundane world filled with people’s plain lives and everyday commutes (much like what the music is trying to say). However, take this imagery and invert it and one is left with a cover that illustrates a completely different atmosphere. The negative white space that previously dominated much of the image becomes a murky and darker night-time like scene that immediately feels less futuristic compared to the pristine quality of the original cover. 

Consequently, the following album ‘Kid A’ released in 2000 features a sky with a similar tone to that of the inverted ‘OK Computer’ cover that fits the sonic quality of the electronic sounds that are much more prominent in this album. These examples demonstrate how the colour scheme of a cover and certain features of it can thematically link to the music at the centre of it. Repeatedly you hear the saying ‘don’t judge a book by its cover’ but how relevant is this statement when it comes to music? Music is a multi-sensory experience and thus album covers can never become obsolete as they aid a listener in immersing themselves in the atmosphere an artist is trying to create.