The 25 Sweetest, Snobbiest Album Covers of 2021

You may not even recognize the artists I picked for my top 25 album covers, since smaller artists sometimes put the most effort into making attention-getting album covers.

Sadly, musicians rarely credit the artist of their covers, but when I’m able to, I call out the artist name. In some rare cases it’s actually the artist themselves who made the cover, like in the case of #10’s Darth Sueder VI by AJ Sueder.

I had to rank the covers in some order but I think every single one of these covers is great. So with that, enjoy my favorite 25 albums. Enjoy, I say!

#25: Failure – Wild Type Droid

#24: Exbats – Now Where Were We

#23: Castello Branco – Niska: Uma Mensagem para Tempos de Emergência

#22: Ty Farris – No Cosign Just Cocaine 2

#21: Acid Mammoth – Caravan

#20 – Diablo Swing Orchestra – Swagger and Stroll Down the Rabbit Hole

#19: The Architects – For Those Who Wish To Exist

#18: Udondolo – Urban Village

#17: Ritual Divination – Here Lies Man

#16: Bodies of Water – Is This What It’s Like

#15: MECO – Transmute

#14 – POLYDANS – Roosevelt

#13: Ghett – Conflict of Interest

#12: Fotocrime – Heart of Crime

Hot and dorky in a very French way. Like the movie Le Samouraï:

Much like that vibe, Fotocrime’s cover is lurid and ugly-beautiful. I want to read the graphic novel I wish existed.

#11: Sad Night Dynamite- Sad Night Dynamite

Did human beings submerge an actual functioning Limo to get this picture? Was a picture altered? I can’t know, but it gets the feeling of the album across. “Icy Violence” is the (very Gorillaz inspired) song that really goes along with this cover.

#10: AJ Suede – Darth Sueder VI

AJ Suede does his own covers and he does an incredible job. The cover of Darth Sueder VI just gets everything right. The parental advisory sticker in Japanese Kanji is a particularly slick touch.

#9: Villagers – Fever Dreams

Such a crisp, beautiful image that asks more questions than it answers. All I know is that bear is super fucking magical.

#8: K-Drama – Both Sides of the Blessing

This is easily the best Christian rap album cover I have ever seen. I challenge you to find me a better one. Was it enough to get me to give this album a serious listen? Not yet. But this album cover is working on me.

#7: KEY- BAD LOVE

This ray gun wouldn’t kill Godzilla, but it would stun him.

#6: Logic1000 – In The Sweetness of You

This is like the uncanny valley of food. Sure, someone really made it, but my brain still isn’t convinced. Luminously lit, but I’m sure that cherry still has a pit.

Jell-O cake appearance: 10

Actual edibility: 6

#5: Odette -Herald

Odette is gorgeous, her music is gorgeous, and this cover is a gorgeous and grotesque painting of her.

#4: Mexican Institute of Sound – Distrito Federal

One of the best albums I listened to because of the cover. Fun, funky, Funkadelic-inspired, the music and the cover. The cover does a great job of letting you know the funky Mexican experience you’re about to have. Electric war babies definitely might get spanked. The slop might get cosmic. This cover has the most mystical, Mexican porn pop-up window.

#3: Baker Boy – Gela

This person is beautiful, the painting is beautiful. What do you call polka dot war paint? Fun paint?

#2: CARCASS – Torn Arteries

I just can’t believe someone did such a good job of making a human heart out of vegetables. That person is a true artist.

Speaking of, I try to find the artists who made these covers, I really do. It’s amazing, however, how uncommon it is to see album covers artists credited.

#1: Eidola – The Architect

This cover is good worldbuilding. I immediately can imagine an entire work of fiction where this Architect character exists, where this mask makes sense. Either someone actually fabricated this incredible mask, or very skillfully used CGI to overlay it on an actual photo. Either way, the effect is incredible.

this blog post is now over, thank you for reading.
as a reminder, it was called: The 25 Sweetest, Snobbiest Album Covers of 2021
it's categorized as: Album Covers, Reviews
link to it, please: Sunday, January 9th, 2022

2021 Album Cover BEST and WORST Honorable Mentions

These are the odds-and-ends that deserved their own categories.

BEST / Fashion

Lovely photo, but the outfit and hairstyle are what elevate this. This guy’s slightly oversized, rumpled dinner jacket over matching pants with bright red shirt and tangled gold accents are sublime. If I saw this dude in person, I’d walk right up to him and tell him how fresh his style is. I feel like you could pull this off in several decades of the past 100 years.

BEST / Attempt to Get All of the Members of a K-Pop Group on Cover

There were almost as many K-Pop albums released this year as heavy metal, which is a lot. K-Pop albums tend to go one of two different directions:

  1. Incredible graphic design
  2. Fit all the inevitably large number of band members on the cover

A surprising number of K-Pop bands choose #2 and their attempts can often be hilarious. What Red Velvet did here on their album “Queendom” is pretty darn next level, involving baloons, birds, wind, and earth moving equipment. It’s safe to say they “really nailed the shot”.

In the runner-up, they managed to get everyone’s heads even, and some pretty incredibly typography to boot. Once you see that R kicked in the stomach and doubled over you can’t unsee it, though.

WORST / Attempt to Get All of the Members of a K-Pop Group on the Cover

Boymen are pretty much the worst offender in this category. There’s a lot of gradations of bad before you get here, however. In full size for your eyeball bleeding pleasure:

BEST / Funniest

This album cover of a confused knife wielding clown demanding to know what, exactly, is so fucking funny, had me in stitches all day the day I posted it, and I still haven’t found a funnier album cover this year.

First runner up for funniest, these two guys holding an info card over themselves with important info like name and “type of voice” (super high tone!) plus drawn on bowties and hairstyles definitely tickled me.

Funniest runner up to the runner up. This guys cover for drugs depicts him both “together” and fully drugged out. I love that in the “fully together” version his tie is still loosened and he’s still smoking a cigarette. In the drug photo he looks properly deranged. Hope you’re having fun, Tyler Posey, recovery is not far behind.

WORST / Ringo Starr Release in 2021

Ringo. You are a goddamn former member of The Beatles and can presumably afford some real heavy-duty PR muscle, but the reality is, your version of cool ended in 1990, which is why when you saw this bargain-bin album cover, you said “YES! CHANGE THE WORLD! THIS IS MY ALBUM COVER!”

The truly hilarious thing here is, that there’s a runner-up in this category…

…yes, another scrubby photo of Ringo Starr, another laughably outdated sentiment and album cover that would have looked dated in 1990. And those… extra jacket zippers? My god.

BEST / Graphic Novel Style

I saw a lot of comic book cover-type art this year, but nothing nearly as striking as this comic look inside a lonely memory. Incredibly impactful graphic image. Crisp, clean, balanced, perfect depiction.

WORST, er, BEST? / ATBGE (Atrocious Taste But Great Execution)

These covers are very well executed, but still incredibly gross and/or cheesy.

WORST / Grossest Mouth

I can’t believe I have to report this had to be a category of its own, and that I actually REJECTED several other gross mouth photos. Stop trying to pass off gross photos of your mouth as an album cover, people.

The busted lip and broken tooth somehow make this, every so slightly grosser than…

…the also horrifying runner-up. There are many, many other examples this year I won’t pain you with.

Best Minimal Use of Type

WORST / Minimal Type Design

Everything about the Yung Head$hit title and cover make me feel dumber. Creativiting Us: From Darkness To All… the holy what? I assure you this dude’s raps are just as poorly written and executed. It’s legitimately embarrassing. But to top it off, the weird mix of alignment, type-sizes, and just horrible balance are really a headscratcher.

BEST / Most Mixtape-ey Mixtape Cover

Checking all the mixtape boxes is important in a Hip Hop mixtape cover, but this one checked all the boxes and then some. Sure other mixtape covers have a cup of lean, but does even their pitbull have a Rollie and a scale? Probably not. Lil’ Migo has corrected that.

BEST / Album Cover I’d Definitely Play if it was a Mobile Game

Well, you know exactly what kind of glossy math rock this is going to be as an album, but I couldn’t help wishing this was a mobile game! I want to play the old dude with the flamethrower and sword mowing down approaching biplanes with fire! Missed opportunity!

BEST Themed Series of Covers – Cue Dot Records

Some time last year, the experimental and electronic music label Cue Dot Records came up with a simple idea for their album covers: a 5X5 grid of colored circles creating an incredibly low resolution icon. Then, for well over a year, they’ve used this framework to express the concept of the individual artist and album releases they put out.

I couldn’t really pick the best, so I’m just posting most of their release covers for 2021. To see all the rest, just go to the Cue Dot Records bandcamp page.

I particularly love Manfred Hamil’s “Everything Fades” for the clearest illustration of an idea in so very few bits.

STAY TUNED for the best album covers of 2021

this blog post is now over, thank you for reading.
as a reminder, it was called: 2021 Album Cover BEST and WORST Honorable Mentions
it's categorized as: Album Covers, Reviews
link to it, please: Saturday, January 1st, 2022

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