GRAMMYs Introduces Best Album Cover Category, Celebrating the Bond Between Design and Music
Album cover design has long been a crucial element of a music release. The listening experience runs in parallel with the visual one, from photographic direction and title placement to layout and illustration. More often than not, an album cover also serves as the gateway for potential listeners to the music and the artist behind it. This year, for the first time in the awards’ 68-year history, album cover design has become part of the GRAMMYs. The decision underscores how powerful visual work can be within a musical release; two disciplines that, in this context, are inseparable.
Complementing the long-running Best Recording Package category in the Package, Notes & Historical field, the newly introduced Best Album Cover category recognizes the creative labor behind album visuals. The spotlight is placed squarely on art directors of the nominated records, who stand behind many of the key creative decisions shaping an album’s identity. On the GRAMMYs’ official website, Recording Academy CEO Harvey Mason Jr. said, “In today’s digital world, album covers are arguably more impactful than ever.” He added that many of us can recognize an iconic cover even without having heard the music. “Their cultural significance is undeniable.”
The CEO also emphasized that the category is meant as an appreciation of art directors. The hope is that it signals how the GRAMMYs see and value the full spectrum of creative work behind a musical release. “The Packaging Field has always thrived, and we expect this to be one of our most inclusive categories,” he said.
This year’s Best Album Cover nominees are CHROMAKOPIA by Tyler, The Creator, The Crux by Djo, Debí Tirar Más Fotos by Bad Bunny, Glory by Perfume Genius, and moisturizer by Wet Leg. CHROMAKOPIA took home the inaugural trophy, honoring its art directors, Shaun Llewellyn and Luis "Panch" Perez. Departing from his typically colorful covers, Tyler, The Creator opted for a sepia-toned look on CHROMAKOPIA. The design is strikingly minimal: a stark portrait of the rapper wearing a ceramic mask molded to his own face–introducing fans to St. Chroma, Tyler’s latest alter ego, which bears a marked resemblance to Chroma the Great from Norton Juster’s classic children’s book The Phantom Tollbooth.
Across the top of the cover, the word CHROMAKOPIA appears in experimental typography, with the letters “C” and “A” shaped like horns–suggesting the structure of an animal or demonic head, or anything horned. The green type complements the overall sepia-brown palette, making the cover feel both harmonious and oddly isolated at the same time.
According to Perez, Tyler wanted to channel the film noir mood of the 1930s and 1940s, even bringing a reference from an Alfred Hitchcock film to the shoot. “He wanted the cover to feel like it came from a film of that era,” Perez said in an interview with ArtNews.
The same approach carries through to the sepia-toned music videos for CHROMAKOPIA’s singles. In “St. Chroma”, a masked Tyler leads a faceless procession before entering a shipping container that erupts in a burst of color. “Noid”, meanwhile, places him amid a series of disorienting horror scenarios, with noir cinematic references clearly in view.
Another standout cover in the Best Album Cover lineup is The Crux, the third album by Joe Keery under his alias Djo. Even before the first track plays, the cover suggests a dense narrative world, filled with stories and characters in every corner. Shot at the iconic Paramount Pictures lot in Los Angeles and art-directed by William Wesley II, the image brings the fictional Crux Hotel to life, complete with guests visible in their windows and pedestrians hurrying beneath an old-fashioned neon sign.
Overhead, a small airplane tows a banner reading “I’M SORRY CINDY AND I LOVE YOU.” Djo himself hangs precariously from a second-floor window, dressed in a white, 1970s-style suit.
In an interview on The Tonight Show Starring Jimmy Fallon, Keery shared some of the inspiration behind the cover. “I’ve done things that were kind of minimalistic before, and this time I wanted a maximal cover. One of the album’s themes is ‘one of many,’ so I wanted a lot going on and a lot to look at,” he said.
The visual design of Debí Tirar Más Fotos by Bad Bunny stands out as the only cover among this year’s nominees that features no human figure at all. Instead of a self-portrait, Bad Bunny, who also served as art director, chose an image of two plastic Monobloc chairs in front of a banana tree as a love letter to his homeland, Puerto Rico. The DtMF cover (whose title translates to I Should Have Taken More Photos) beautifully captures the essence of the place, where Bad Bunny spent much of the summer and early fall performing a residency at José Miguel Agrelot Coliseum in San Juan.
The empty chairs in the foreground evoke a quiet sense of longing and solitude. Taken as a whole, the album’s visual language reads as a sincere dedication to Puerto Rican culture.
Ultimately, the arrival of the Best Album Cover category at the GRAMMYs affirms that music and visuals are two languages that strengthen one another in shaping the listening experience. From this year’s nominees, it is clear that cover design is no longer merely a “wrapper,” but a point of entry into the ideas, emotions, and contexts behind a record. The recognition opens a wider space for creative workers to stand alongside musicians as partners who help determine how a work will be remembered, discussed, and, most importantly, felt by its audience.
