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

Album Covers of 2021: HEAVY. METAL. EDITION.

If I had to guess, I’d say more heavy metal albums are released than any other single genre. Of course, I’m lumping together Drone Metal, Grindcore, Sludge Metal, Stoner Metal, Black Metal, Industrial Black Metal, Space Metal, Melodic Metal, Thrash Metal, Symphonic Black Metal, Funk Metal, Rap Metal, and a bunch of other metals I can’t even think of right now. If you think I made any of those up, you definitely don’t metal. But now you can get a taste, without even listening to any metal.

That is because heavy metal album covers have their own world. Their own aesthetic. Their own complicated iconography. Get a taste of it here, starting with…

The Worst:

Some metal album covers look like a skilled 7th grader did them, or they’re just so corny you can’t believe an adult thought they were cool.

The Gnarliest:

This is the core of the heavy metal aesthetic. Body horror. Apocalypse. Apocalyptic body horror. Gates opening to hell. Horrific monsters. Dystopian future war. Things growing into or out of people’s faces.

The Best

These are the best conventional heavy metal album covers. They’re overdone and gnarly, but in a really cool, balanced way!

The Unconventional:

You wouldn’t even guess these were heavy metal albums. I laud these albums for taking the Heavy Metal Album Cover in a new direction.

this blog post is now over, thank you for reading.
as a reminder, it was called: Album Covers of 2021: HEAVY. METAL. EDITION.
it's categorized as: Album Covers, Reviews
link to it, please: Thursday, December 30th, 2021

The 10 WORST Album Covers of 2021

I stopped doing Twitter reviews of bad albums at some point earlier this year. Why? Because no matter how funny my reviews are: no one “likes” bad album covers. Thus, no one sees the reviews. So I’m sure I missed many bad album covers, because I only included ones I posted at the time. Also, there are dozens of bad Hip Hop Mix Tapes released every week and I generally don’t cover them because…I feel like it would veer into actually racist territory. There’s a notable exception on the list.

For instance there are a million of these:

That said, I am absolutely certain that my #1 worst album of the year is actually, objectively the worst album released this year. It would take a very bad album cover indeed to beat it for the rest of the decade, in my opinion. It is horrible. Props to Exclaim’s excellent list. They caught many I missed, and although we disagree on a few, I am happy to say we both agree on the #1 worst album of the year.

Not included are bad heavy metal covers because heavy metal covers are their own genre, and I’m giving them their own list.

#10: Willie Jones – Right Now

Right No.

#9: Sun Kil Moon – Welcome to Sparks, NV

There are a lot of album covers like this, a cruddy, poorly exposed photo with some lens flare that the artist themselves took. They clearly deluded themselves into thinking was more meaningful than it is. This is just a photo of the sun shining through treetops with lens flare that washes out all the contrast and saturation of the photo. If this was on Instagram you would just scroll right past it, perhaps with a snort. Then he just slapped some white text and a horizontal line on it. Good job, Mark. That really makes me want to listen to more of your depressed warbling.

#8 – BennY RevivaL – GLAAD GAME

Months later, and I still can’t decide how intentionally bad this album cover is. I am all for sex positive gender expression and weirdness, absolutely, but this is an assault on the senses that I can’t let slide. I feel like they promised too many friends a spot on their cover and had like fifteen minutes to put the collage together and run to Kinkos. All the photos mashed together without any kind of border or layout. The font mixing. The white-on-rainbow-in-a-narrow-strip. It all seems designed to harm the eyes. And it’s successful.

#7: Lil Wayne & Rich the Kid – Trust Fund Babies

This is what multi-millionaire entertainer Lil Wayne chose to front his collab mix tape with Rich the Kid. I get that he’s projecting low expectations but damn is it bad.

#6: DoisPes & bedhop – C A F E

If I were going to teach a typography and graphic design class, I could use this album cover as a thesis level study on what not to do. It’s like a parody of bad typography. See if you can identify all the horrifying choices they made.

#5: DJ Blackpower – blp2021: “for ur own good”

It burns.

#4: “CHAIN GANG HALO WORLD” by BLACK KRAY AKA SICKBOYRARI is LIVE FROM GOTHGANISTAN

I will admit that this recording and album cover no longer really exists on the internet, but it did on August 20th, 2021. However, Goth Money Records still exists and this definitely matches their album cover profile. Allow yourself to just slowly absorb all the elements in this album cover. It’s magnificent. I almost regret putting it in the “Worst Albums” list and not the “Best Albums” list.

Almost.

#3: Margaret – Maggie Vision

There’s so much glow on Polish hip-hop artist Margaret’s album cover, it’s hard to find an element on it that’s not glowing. The logo is glowing. Maggie herself is glowing. The disco balls are glowing. The overlapping boxes haphazardly laid over each other are glowing. There are a few bonus glowing spheres in the background, just to make sure there’s enough glow.

I actually listened to this album, and it’s a relatively well-produced and enjoyable, if cookie-cutter, Polish pop album. I’m genuinely sad for her that she was saddled with this hack job of an album cover.

#2: Rigo – Pimpin On The Web

Every Friday of the year, there are at least five truly awful Hip Hop mixtape covers. I usually don’t bother to cover them, even though some are laughably bad. But still, I have some special hostility for casual misogyny and glorification of sex trafficking in 2021. The stereotypes here are so ugly, so lazy, so poorly executed, so lumpy and stupid, that I just had to highlight how bad this cover is. It’s sort of like a bad political comic, but even worse.

#1: Drake – Certified Lover Boy

You’ll notice I use the 80’s hip-hop terminology whack here to describe Drake and the fact that he thought this whole thing was a good idea. I use whack instead of some other word to say it sucks for a specific reason. Whack has the connotation in hip-hop terminology to mean not only is an artist is bad, but that they’re embarrassingly bad and they don’t even realize it. They think they’re really good, but their self delusion is part of what makes them and their art suck so badly. That’s why I use the term here liberally, and I’ve never used it more appropriately.

Drake’s incredible achievement of in-poor-taste peak whackness couldn’t have been done alone. Drake actually commissioned the “world famous official fine artist of pure whackness” Damien Hirst. Damien Hirst is the type of guy to:

So, it’s kind of a marriage of whackness made in heaven. I get what he’s going for here but this is multilevel whack on whack on whack. The implication here is that Drake’s “character” in this album, the titular “Certified Lover Boy” is so virile and prolific that he’s an equal opportunity simultaneous impregnator of women of all races and creeds that they can be reduced to an emoji to save time when representing them.

Can this possibly get worse? Yes. Let me provide some context:

Drake, notably, definitively lost 2018’s most insane rap battle when rapper Pusha T revealed that Drake:

A) Had appeared in “blacker-face” for a previous project he did… yes, this is a picture of young Drake:

B) Had a secret love child named Adonis who he was planning on announcing to the world with an Adidas shoe line and press tour.

Pusha T’s rap (which I very highly recommend listening to if you like brutality) basically tanked the Adidas deal (we guess the shoe line must have been called Adidon) and ended Drake’s high batting average of “winning” rap battles in the public eye definitively.

So, to some extent, this album cover can be read as him trying to rebrand himself as someone who’s proud of having fathered a bunch of secret love children. You see where I’m going with how truly whack this is?

this blog post is now over, thank you for reading.
as a reminder, it was called: The 10 WORST Album Covers of 2021
it's categorized as: Album Covers, Reviews
link to it, please: Wednesday, December 29th, 2021

Top 10 Album Covers of 2021 that look “Most Likely to Contain a Passage of Beguiling Flute™”

This album could have been the 2014 winner:

When I started looking through album covers late last year, there seemed to be an endless supply of Prog Rock and New Age looking album covers. I started joking with twitter user @ChristyW907 that an album cover could win an award for being “The Most Likely to Contain a Passage of Beguiling Flute™” and I picked a winner every week. Out of the whole year, there were some real standouts, that seemed truly likely to contain beguiling flute.

Elements that generally made an album seem likely were a fantastical landscape, preferably with multiple moons or planets in the background, dreamcatchers, or other wispy fantasy elements.

What is beguiling flute, specifically, you ask? It’s one of those things where when you hear it, you know. It’s a passage of flute that whimsically invites the listener to don a filmy skirt and peasant shirt and dance inexorably towards the unseen flautist.

A note: some of these albums I listened to and confirmed there was, in fact, a passage of beguiling flute, but most don’t really, and the ones that do are lost to time and memory. You’ll have to give every album a listen yourself to find out for sure.

10: Sungazer – Perihelion

An unconventional choice, chosen for looking like a New Agey Prog Rock “project” like The Alan Parson’s Project. There are no moons or planets per se, but I can definitely hear the flute.

#9: Strick – Strick Land

This album has the distinction of being the only album that is both likely to contain beguiling flute, and language that a parent would feel caution about exposing a small child to. While I can’t make out a lot of extra planets in the sky, we’ve got the flute-ception-like fantasy-landscape-within-a-fantasy-landscape, a waterfall, and some sexy beings trapped in crystals. All of these point to beguiling flute.

#8: The Sherlocks – World I Understand

It’s incredible how common a theme interlocking clocks are in prog rock albums. There were actually several that didn’t make the list but seemed even likelier to contain beguiling flute, but World I Understand makes it because I like the concept of their weird steampunk head-device.

#7: Kalidia – Lies’ Device

First of all let’s talk about the placement of the apostrophe in the album title, indicating that the titular “Device” actually belongs to lies themselves. Then we have over-adorned font curlicues in the band title, a symbolic wheel of lies, mysterious occult figures, eyes, and…some tentacles of lies? Either way, I am certain there is going to be beguiling flute inside.

#6: JPL – Sapiens chapitre 2 / 3 : Deus ex Machina

First of all we’ve got the off-brand “Yes”-look-alike logo of JPL. Next we’ve got what looks to be a planet and the planet’s own moon. We’ve got a generic spaceship coming in for a landing. We’ve got a lone figure contemplating the passage of time outside a glimmering city. We’ve got an extremely French multi-part title. All of this points to at least one passage of beguiling flute.

#5: Galaad – Paradis posthumes

Here we have a mandala of vague figures from various belief systems across the world, a hazy treatment, and a distressed fine-art frame. Add the not-quite-well-designed band’s typefaces, and you can be almost certain you’re in for some beguiling flute.

#4: DREAMCATCHER – Dystopia: Road to Utopia

The subtle psychedelic embossed rainbow dreamcatcher seems to almost ensure beguiling flute.

#3: Syrinx Call – Mirrorneuron

I cheated a little and bumped this album up probably further than the cover itself deserved when I found out that German recorder player Volker Kuinke is the main feature of Syrinx Call. Check out the incredible masthead of his website as he passionately recorders like some kind of recorder god:

#2: Emphasis: Spiral of Time

I decided that each moon or planet hanging peacefully in the sky adds to the likelihood of beguiling flute. I feel like the leader of Emphasis sat there next to the designer, asking for yet another moon, until finally he cried out in a Scottish accent, “There’s nae room for anymore moons!” Add a lonely figure. Pair that with the over-adorned “E” in the band’s name, and you’ve got some extreme likelihood.

#1: Joel Vandroogenbroeck – For View

An obvious slam dunk, since there is not only hippie imagery, but actual flute playing is depicted. This is the quintessential beguiling flute indicator. Is it a little on-the-nose? Absolutely. Still, however, the year’s winner of the award.

this blog post is now over, thank you for reading.
as a reminder, it was called: Top 10 Album Covers of 2021 that look “Most Likely to Contain a Passage of Beguiling Flute™”
it's categorized as: Album Covers, Reviews
link to it, please: Tuesday, December 28th, 2021

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