1-Final.png)
Don’t Judge an Album by Its Cover – Especially Not in 2025
- HARD
- Jul 17
- 6 min read
What makes an album cover “good?” Is it artistic value, or how it represents the music? Or is it a photo of the artist where they look good? What sets an album cover like Weyes Blood’s celebrated “Titanic Rising” apart from those that are less well-received, like Sabrina Carpenter’s “Man’s Best Friend,” or Taylor Swift’s “(Taylor’s Version)” covers? While it’s difficult to argue the artistic value of any given photograph, we can examine definitive aspects of how it supports the album.
An album cover is the first thing the audience sees when an artist releases the record, and thus the ultimate first impression. Generally, a good cover is aesthetically pleasing in some way, represents the album’s message, and communicates the overall mood of the work. Album art is a still visual representation of the music, and unlike music videos that further communicate the message later on in the rollout, the cover is the first and only thing one has to see when they listen to the music. Because it is the most prominent and front-facing visual of the record, a “good” cover is, yes, nice to look at – but most importantly, it has something to say.
Pop music, arguably now more than ever, is music intended to sell. That doesn’t mean it’s not “good” or “serious” music – but that fact is relevant to any discussion around the promotion of albums, and their visuals. Pop music is designed for radio plays, and it has been for quite some time, but it’s become more than that in the last few years. When artists promote their music, they are almost always promoting it on social media. Remember the attention grab, “Did I just write the song of the summer?” or even the guilt trip, “My label says they are going to drop me if my video doesn’t go viral!” And that’s the crux – going viral. How did artists like Gracie Abrams, Sabrina Carpenter, and Chappell Roan become famous “overnight” after they’d been trying to break through for years? They went viral while opening for bigger artists like Taylor Swift and Olivia Rodrigo, and thus their songs that had been out for months to years echoed worldwide, all at the same time.
In the 2020’s, the key to mainstream success was forged from the metals of keys past (i.e. good music, the “X” factor, famous dad, etc) into one very large key that, though encompassing all the other metals, represented one thing: garnering attention online. This is the heart of why artists that vy for mainstream success often opt for what I brand as: THE WORST ALBUM COVER THERE IS! Which is, put simply – a boring cover, that says nothing about the album, but the artist is on it and they look nice.
All of these covers are simple portraits with almost nothing to say – but each of them worked beautifully as profile pictures at the time of their promotion. They also shift the focus to what the artist is actually selling: themselves.
Pop music, often critiqued as being “basic” and less “serious” than other genres, has become insecure. It has begun to think that, with the rise in significance of niches and aesthetics, it may be more viable to sell the idea of Taylor Swift rather than the music Taylor Swift actually makes – but this is a mistake. Artists like Taylor Swift, Olivia Rodrigo, and Chappell Roan are not famous because they sell the idea that they are good musicians, and beautiful, and it’s so cool to be a fan! Yes, all of those things are involved in the marketing of their work and the branding of their persona. But like many pop musicians that came before them, they are critically acclaimed and revered as excellent performers – and like all musicians that came before them, not everyone agrees – but those are the metals that were transformed by alchemists at record labels to create the “Going Viral” key, and they’re still the most important aspects of success.
The problem with an artist primarily selling themselves instead of the music is that there is no room for error. The newly infamous “Man’s Best Friend” cover from Sabrina Carpenter did go viral, and it does work well as her profile picture; however, it sent the wrong message about the album, and even resulted in Carpenter facing personal backlash about the kind of message it sends about feminism. Subsequently, the singer released several alternate covers for brands like Target and Urban Outfitters to make up for the damage to her reputation and potential lost sales without replacing the cover or apologising for its controversial nature. There was one comment from a user online that struck me the most, however, and it had nothing to do with politics – they said they didn’t care at all about the controversy, but they hated the cover anyway because it was boring. The user further remarked that it looked like it came from Pinterest. The alternate covers, though inoffensive, followed suit: a photo of her slow dancing with a faceless man (a reference to Marilyn Monroe that reads like a knockoff), followed by a shot of her surrounded by beautiful flowers. She looks great, the image is pretty, and it says absolutely nothing about the record. They are, as that user pointed out, photos you would find on Pinterest if you searched up anything with the word “aesthetic” after it. Because of this, all of the covers are far from meeting the standards of what makes album art “good” – and even going viral couldn’t save them.
Alternatively, the cover art for “Titanic Rising” by Weyes Blood, mentioned above, is a famously “good” cover – and that’s because it checks all three boxes. It’s aesthetically pleasing, represents the content of the album, and communicates the mood of the work. Natalie Mering, a.k.a. Weyes Blood, confided in an interview with Stereogum about the design of the cover and why she chose it. She begins, “Well, it’s kind of like the waters have risen over this bedroom which to me is symbolic of kind of a subconscious altar that all young people in western culture create for themselves. This kind of altar for whatever they worship in their sacred space that’s just theirs” (Kaplan, 2019). Mering goes on to discuss the concept of the subconscious, individualism in the modern age, and references from past eras that influenced the surrealist elements and symbols used in the cover. She pointedly notes about the visual, “To me it stands for a lot of the silliness of our modern culture where the kind of things that we worship in our sacred spaces are based on media and movies because we don’t really have much else in the way of myths, if that makes sense” (Kaplan, 2019).
Mering’s statement, seemingly of passing at the beginning of her interview with Ilana Kaplan of Stereogum, maintains its relevance many years later in a post-social media age where celebrity worship and influencer culture have taken hold in a way that affects how every piece of media is released and promoted. Selling music, particularly pop, is selling the persona and brand of the artist as much as – if not more than – the music itself. This has always been the case to some degree, and has been greatly amplified in recent years – but it’s unnecessary. Successful music of any genre relies on quality, storytelling, and effective visuals. It always has, and it still does, despite the push from alchemists at record labels.
What makes an album cover “good?” A good cover serves as the spokesperson of the album. It makes a statement true to the work, and can always step aside to let the music speak for itself.
Reference List
Carpenter, S. (2018). Sabrina Carpenter. [online] Instagram.com. Available at:
Kaplan, I. (2019). Weyes Blood Shows Us How She Made The Striking Cover For Her Exquisite
New Album. [online] Stereogum. Available at:
over/interviews/.
Comments