Grammy Awards revive album cover category after 50 year-hiatus

After a hiatus spanning more than half a century, the Recording Academy has reinstated its Best Album Cover category. It is a significant gear shift in the way the industry applauds visual identity in the digital era, in splitting purer cover art from the broader Best Recording Package award focused on physical materials like vinyl inserts and gatefolds.

Recording Academy reinstates Best Album Cover category

As Recording Academy CEO Harvey Mason Jr. remarked, the split acknowledges the "power of just one image in a sea of streaming thumbnails." Yet for the creative teams responsible for this year’s nominees, the work is as hands-on and collaborative as ever.

The inaugural shortlist offers a jarring juxtaposition of surreal and nostalgic. Wet Leg’s Rhian Teasdale, nominated alongside Iris Luz and Lava La Rue for the sophomore album Moisturizer, was searching for something "repulsive yet feminine". The final cover-a creature-like portrait of Teasdale squatting with an eerie grin-was inspired by a weekend at an Airbnb filled with handmade props such as velvet worms and lizard-like gloves.

In contrast, Tyler, the Creator's Chromakopia uses a stark, monochrome close-up. DoP Luis Perez explained that the mask-wearing portrait conveys a certain energy through the artist's eyes, leaning into into an old Hollywood aesthetic.

Building visual worlds

Mass production was integral to Djo’s The Crux. Art directors William Wesley II and Neil Krug created a virtual hotel setting on a Paramount Studios backlot, inspired by the voyeuristic quality of James Stewart and Grace Kelly in the Hitchcock film Rear Window.

As the industry awaits the event, its renewal can be said to confirm the value of the photographers and designers who set the visual tone for the music industry in its entirety. Its acceptance, whether in a five-inch format or in a twelve-inch vinyl form, signifies that the ‘face’ of the album goes beyond its commercial value to be the very essence of the album itself.

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