I Spy... An Album Cover Trend
From Djo to The Beatles, Orville Peck, Demi Lovato and more.
This week’s piece is sponsored by Sleevenote, a new music player that supports full sleeve art for your digital music collection. A music hardware startup, they’re looking for early adopters to buy an experimental first-edition prototype. Find out more at sleevenote.com.
One of the first photographers I became enamored with in my freshman year of college was Gregory Crewdson. Known for his cinematic stills captured on large-format film, Crewdson contrives every detail of his photographs, from the setting and lighting to casting and actions. Looking closely at one of his photos, “Untitled” (2004), we settle on a suburban grocery store at dusk. While the scene at first glimpse seems stark, the picture is filled with layers of carefully orchestrated minutiae.
![Gregory Crewdson | Untitled [Trouble with Harry's] (2003-2008) | Artsy](https://substackcdn.com/image/fetch/$s_!HmSH!,f_auto,q_auto:good,fl_progressive:steep/https%3A%2F%2Fsubstack-post-media.s3.amazonaws.com%2Fpublic%2Fimages%2F756cb567-3f3a-4900-9f27-b4909924006e_1917x1249.jpeg "Gregory Crewdson | Untitled [Trouble with Harry's] (2003-2008) | Artsy")
In the center of the photo, a woman unloads her groceries, spotlit by a street lamp. To her right, a pair of legs dangle out of a station wagon. Behind, a man wheels carts across the lot. Inside the supermarket, workers check out customers and stock shelves. Down the street, warm windows light the block while neon signs hang in a bar. Each action is a scene in itself, waiting to be noticed.
In early November, the GRAMMY Awards announced the nominees for the 68th ceremony, including five for the inaugural Best Album Cover category. Two of the nominees, Djo’s The Crux and Perfume Genius’ Glory, evoke Crewdson in their highly detailed imagery. On The Tonight Show Starring Jimmy Fallon, singer Joe Keery explained, “I wanted a maximal cover,” arms spread wide. Squinting, he points out a small mouse standing next to the bellman dressed exactly like him, the size of a fingernail. “That you would never see, I think it’s basically just for me,” he smiles. Surrounding the mouse, we see Keery hanging out a window, a figure crawling out of a manhole, others looking up at the sky in wonder, and a red plane with a banner that reads “I’m sorry, Cindy, and I love you,” among numerous other easter eggs.
Perfume Genius’ Glory finds its cover enshrouded in a darker veil of mystery. Singer Mike Hadreas lies on the floor in an uncomfortable twist, feet propped against a windowsill. A figure sits to the right just out of frame, looking out at the scene, which is riddled with cords, an empty can, and a loose shoe. Softly lit by a large window, we spy another person obscured by leaves standing in the yard, looking in. In an interview with Wallpaper*, Hadreas comments, “…we were trying to capture something in the moment, with all of these little easter eggs. One of the paintings, I made. There’s a little piece of Italian flag in there, with no reasoning behind it, it’s just absurd, and we were dying laughing about how it was in everything, but also very serious about how it had to be… when we got the pictures back, it felt like a snapshot, almost like a still from a movie. There’s a before and after. It feels like the music, in that it’s earnest and personal, but with absurdity and dramatics, and performance.” Shot by photographer Cody Critcheloe, the image’s moody tone feels closest to Crewdson’s work.
Enticing spectacles, both covers follow a long lineage of hyper-detailed album covers. Perhaps this trend started with The Beatles’ 1967 album Sgt. Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club Band. The crowd of cardboard cutouts and wax figures that surround the band includes Marilyn Monroe, Bob Dylan, Karl Marx, and Sri Yukteswar Giri, among seventy others. As noted by Jason Draper, the assemblage may feel like it has no rhyme or reason, yet is “a fascinating cross-section of cultures, importance, and each individual Beatle’s own interests.”
In 2022, photographer Pelle Cass photographed the cover of New York Magazine’s 18th annual “Reasons to Love New York” issue. Known for his time-lapse images, Cass shot 72 celebrities crossing the same intersection and later sifted through 10,912 photos to create the single eye-catching image that graced the cover. This year, art director Alfie Allen paired Pelle Cass with London producer Facta for the cover of his album, GULP. As told to It’s Nice That, Allen found that in “the musical world of Facta, familiar ideas are altered – vocals become scrambled and basslines become distorted – Pelle’s photographic style personifies this wonderfully through impressively composite images that suggest that something is slightly off.”
Another signal of a trend reaching its peak is when the mainstream takes hold, cue Demi Lovato. On the cover of her ninth studio album, It’s Not That Deep, we find the former Disney Channel star surrounded by an array of figures. Two friends play chess, a child races by with a soccer ball, a dog runs around, and workers on set give a slightly meta undertone, all whilst Lovato stands nude in the center of the image, covered by a freshly dry-cleaned pink slip dress. In an interview with Spotify for Artists, the singer comments, “It’s no secret that my life is on display, and that I’m on display in front of so many people all the time. And that’s kind of what the album cover is symbolic of.”
As seen on the New York Magazine cover, this trope has permeated pop culture for ages, also a staple of Italian brand DIESEL’s fashion campaigns and in the work of director collaborators Vania Heymann and Gal Muggia. Done to the uncanny extreme, the duo’s music videos for A$AP Rocky and Sabrina Carpenter represent a depth and humor I wish to see more of. Yet, it’s interesting to see how this trend has now seeped into album art over the past few years. While many hyper-detailed illustrated and collaged album covers exist, this latest movement finds itself rooted in photography. All cinematically lit and carefully composed like Crewdson’s work. These types of covers aren’t necessarily streaming-friendly, but make you stop as you scroll on social media. In a chaotic climate, they fit right in while also standing out. Perhaps building out these elaborate scenes is the one instance in which the artists have control of the absurdity they sing about.
See more of these album covers below:
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loved this read! i also noticed this trend while rounding up my favorite album artwork of 2025. another example i found was The Last Dinner Party’s From The Pyre!
Crewdson rocks. Great article as always.