Go ahead and judge a record by its cover, as our critic takes a closer look at this year’s nominations in the Best Album Cover category.
Tyler, The Creator: CHROMAKOPIA. Shaun Llewellyn & Luis “Panch” Perez, art directors. This cover situates photographic portraiture within a lineage of Black bandleaders for whom image functioned as a kind of public architecture, carrying an echo of Nat King Cole and a moment when elegance operated as a cultural survival strategy. The mask, meanwhile, introduces an uncanny disturbance, a cinema noir slippage that deflects the image from mere homage.
Djo: The Crux. William Wesley II, art director. These pictures manifest a specifically Los Angeles mythology rooted in studio backlots and the city’s long habit of rehearsing itself for the camera. Treating the dioramic street as Hollywood vernacular of believable falseness, the brick, fire escapes, neon, and choreographed figures assemble like call times—by daylight in the frazzle of a working set, while the deluxe edition’s rainy night folds in a nocturnal frisson.
Perfume Genius: Glory. Cody Critcheloe & Andrew J.S., art directors. This almost shockingly gallery-ready image speaks in idioms familiar to contemporary art, assembling a staged domestic interior into a tableau of contorted, frozen emotion and psycho-spatial tension. Evoking histories of durational performance, choreographed abjection, and constructed intimacy, the atmospheric light oppresses as the body is placed in calibrated precarity that feels like a metaphor for our times.
Wet Leg: moisturizer. Hester Chambers, Ellis Durand, Henry Holmes, Matt de Jong, Jamie-James Medina, Joshua Mobaraki & Rhian Teasdale, art directors. The photograph deploys the figure as both subject and irritant, pressed into a low, feral insistence. Coltish, gym-socked limbs splay and torque across shag carpeting, dragging a faint stench of 1980s domesticity, as humor, menace, and desire circulate in its elusively grotesque energy, producing an image that holds visual discomfort as a primal form of intelligence and wit.
Bad Bunny: Debí Tirar Más Fotos. Benito Antonio Martinez Ocasio, art director. This cheeky, poetic snap embraces the shared absurdity of image-making in an era of compulsive documentation, where a marginal backyard scene can accrue unexpected gravity through the simple choice to post it. The photograph understands how attention now operates, allowing absent-mindedly placed furniture in a romantically suggestive twosome, to unexpectedly and perhaps undeservedly exist as something much more profound. Per the album’s title, the idea of “taking more pictures” could register as either irony or regret, or perhaps both.
