Try call­ing to mind Nirvana’s Nev­er­mind with­out its naked, swim­ming baby; or Lon­don Call­ing with­out Paul Simenon smash­ing his bass. Think of Sgt. Pepper’s or Abbey Road with­out think­ing about their sleeves. Clas­sic rock albums and clas­sic, unfor­get­table album cov­ers are insep­a­ra­bly inter­twined.

Imag­ine Dark Side of the Moon with­out its prism….

Hipg­no­sis, the design team behind the near­ly 50-year-old album cover/t‑shirt/poster/bumper sticker/coffee mug/etc. com­plete­ly nailed it, as they say, with this design. They did so after sev­er­al less-than-icon­ic but still mem­o­rable attempts to rep­re­sent the band’s sound with a sin­gle image.

Made up of design­ers Storm Thorg­er­son, Aubrey Pow­ell, and, lat­er, Peter “Sleazy” Christo­pher­son, Hipg­no­sis first got its start when the for­mer art school friends of Pink Floyd asked to design the sleeve for the band’s 1968 A Saucer­ful of Secrets, their sec­ond stu­dio album and first with­out found­ing singer/songwriter Syd Bar­rett. There­after fol­lowed designs for More, Ummagum­ma, Atom Heart Moth­er, Med­dle, and Obscured by Clouds.

In-between Pink Floyd albums, Hipg­no­sis picked up com­mis­sions from dozens of oth­er musi­cians, includ­ing well-known names like T. Rex, Wish­bone Ash, The Hol­lies, The Pret­ty Things, Elec­tric Light Orches­tra, Rory Gal­lagher, and many oth­ers.

Once the Dark Side prism appeared in 1973, “all the top high-pro­file bands who could afford the Lon­don design­ers’ art­work showed up at their door,” as one account puts it.

Led Zep­pelin knocked, as did Peter Framp­ton, Nazareth, Bad Com­pa­ny, Gen­e­sis, Peter Gabriel… Hipg­no­sis’ recog­ni­tion as pre­mier graph­ic inter­preters of rock, most notably of albums that emerged in the post-PF pro­gres­sive boom of the 70s, was ful­ly secured by a string of unfor­get­table cov­ers. Many oth­er album designs from their 190-cov­er career you may have nev­er seen, and may not find near­ly as com­pelling as, say, Wish You Were Here, whose man-on-fire hand­shake burns into the reti­nas.

The team had an unusu­al approach with many of their post-Dark Side cov­ers, recall­ing the 60s with psy­che­del­ic and satir­i­cal imagery, espe­cial­ly on album art for bands who got their start the pre­vi­ous decade. But they updat­ed the aes­thet­ic, invent­ing the “tech­no-psy­che­del­ic visu­al iden­ti­ty” of the 70s, as The Guardian writes, and turn­ing flower pow­er into machine pow­er, post-indus­tri­al land­scapes, apoc­a­lyp­tic fan­tasies, and pop art col­lages. The influ­ence of Christo­pher­son, who became a full part­ner in 1978, helped pull the design­ers into the sleek­er 1980s with cov­ers for Peter Gabriel, The Police, and Scor­pi­ons.

Many clas­sic album artists find a visu­al brand and stick with it. Some, like H.R. Giger, are already extreme­ly niche. Oth­ers, like the leg­endary design team at Blue Note records, have the man­date of defin­ing not only an indi­vid­ual album’s look, but also that of an entire record label. One of the remark­able things about Hipg­no­sis is their range—a char­ac­ter­is­tic that fur­ther fits with their rep­u­ta­tion as “The Bea­t­les of album cov­er art,” writes Why It Mat­ters. “Nobody has ever done it bet­ter than the British design firm.”

As free agents, they could approach each record as a sin­gu­lar work. They were as com­fort­able work­ing with pho­tog­ra­phy as they were cre­at­ing orig­i­nal art­work. They could rep­re­sent brood­ing Eng­lish folk and neon New Wave. Album cov­ers have sold pop­u­lar music for about as long as it has exist­ed as a com­mod­i­ty, but Hipg­no­sis sig­nif­i­cant­ly raised the bar, espe­cial­ly in their con­tin­ued work with Pink Floyd and their Led Zep­pelin cov­ers.

Some Hipg­no­sis cov­ers are time­less, some dat­ed, some baf­fling con­cep­tu­al exper­i­ments that sure­ly made more sense in the plan­ning stages. A NSFW theme of female tor­sos pre­dom­i­nates. It’s hard to say to what degree each band had a hand in choos­ing and direct­ing each image. The design­ers’ last cov­er was for Led Zeppelin’s Coda, released in 1982. “There’s quite a bit of poet­ry in that. In their fif­teen years togeth­er the firm pro­duced many of the most icon­ic cov­ers in music his­to­ry.” As for cor­re­la­tions between the qual­i­ty of the music and the qual­i­ty of the cov­er art—that’s an inves­ti­ga­tion we leave to you. See many more Hipg­no­sis cov­ers at Why It Mat­ters and The Guardian. And if you can swing it, see Thorg­er­son and Pow­ell’s book, For the Love of Vinyl: The Album Art of Hipg­no­sis. Or Pow­ell’s Vinyl, Album, Cov­er Art: The Com­plete Hipg­no­sis.

Relat­ed Con­tent:

The Impos­si­bly Cool Album Cov­ers of Blue Note Records: Meet the Cre­ative Team Behind These Icon­ic Designs

Art Record Cov­ers: A Book of Over 500 Album Cov­ers Cre­at­ed by Famous Visu­al Artists

7 Rock Album Cov­ers Designed by Icon­ic Artists: Warhol, Rauschen­berg, Dalí, Richter, Map­plethor­pe & More

H.R. Giger’s Dark, Sur­re­al­ist Album Cov­ers: Deb­bie Har­ry, Emer­son, Lake & Palmer, Celtic Frost, Danzig & More

Josh Jones is a writer and musi­cian based in Durham, NC. Fol­low him at @jdmagness

The work of H.R. Giger is immense­ly pow­er­ful. Giger’s amaz­ing cov­er for Emer­son, Lake and Palmer’s album Brain Sal­ad Surgery por­trays a Goth­ic touch that could fit any heavy met­al band at any time.

—Jim­my Page

Swiss artist Hans Rue­di Giger is a genre unto his own, sin­gle-hand­ed­ly invent­ing the bio­me­chan­i­cal hor­ror of the 1980s with his designs for Rid­ley Scott’s 1979 Alien, the film that launched him into inter­na­tion­al promi­nence and turned Deb­bie Har­ry on to his work. Meet­ing him the fol­low­ing year, the Blondie singer asked Giger to design the cov­er and music videos for her solo album, KooKoo.

The album was panned, but the cov­er end­ed up being as pre­scient as the film that pre­ced­ed it. It would “see its influ­ence in films like Hell­rais­er, the rise of what was called the ‘mod­ern prim­i­tive’ move­ment, and help cul­ti­vate the dark masochis­tic char­ac­ter Har­ry would play in David Cronenberg’s Video­drome,” writes Ted Mills in an ear­li­er Open Cul­ture post. “It was a feel­ing that would flour­ish in the deca­dent ‘80s.”

The record was also, in a way, “a throw­back to Giger’s oth­er famous record cov­er, the one for Emer­son, Lake, and Palmer’s Brain Sal­ad Surgery” from 1973 (above). Ten years before Alien, Giger designed his first album cov­er, for a “pro­to-met­al” band called The Shiv­ers.

Their 1969 Walpur­gis, fea­tures what look very much like Alien’s face­hug­gers. Giger had been hav­ing this night­mare for a long time. Years after these begin­nings, due in large part to Alien and its sequels and the Deb­bie Har­ry cov­er, Giger became high­ly sought after by met­al bands, from Celtic Frost to Danzig to Car­cass.

His work appears, how­ev­er, on far more album cov­ers than he would like. There have been “many small bands over the years,” he writes on his site, “pre­sum­ably fans of mine, who had appro­pri­at­ed my art­work for their album and CD cov­ers,” with­out get­ting per­mis­sion. Giger him­self has only cre­at­ed a few pieces specif­i­cal­ly as album cov­er art, the last in 1989 for Steve Stevens’ Atom­ic Play­boys. “Of the approx­i­mate­ly 20 records on which my art­work has been seen over the last 30 years,” he writes, only a small num­ber have been com­mis­sions. These include The Shiv­ers, ELP, Har­ry, and Stevens.

All the oth­er covers—those offi­cial­ly sanc­tioned, in any case—come from work Giger “made for myself, many years before, which the bands, lat­er, licensed for their own use after see­ing them in my books.” Though Giger him­self is more of a jazz fan, his appeal to heavy met­al is obvi­ous. “Giger’s style of adding a sur­re­al­ist twist to mechan­i­cal and bio­log­i­cal scenes,” writes All­mu­sic, “often with twist­ed sex­u­al undertones—was imme­di­ate­ly iden­ti­fi­able,” and imme­di­ate­ly iden­ti­fied a band as some­thing seduc­tive­ly taboo and pos­si­bly dead­ly.

At least one use of his work got a band pros­e­cut­ed. “Bay Area punks the Dead Kennedys includ­ed a poster of Giger’s Land­scape #XX, also known as Penis Land­scape (the image depict­ed rows of erect phal­lus­es in coitus), in the pack­ag­ing of their 1985 album Frankenchrist,” writes Rolling Stone, “and were sub­se­quent­ly put on tri­al for obscen­i­ty.”

Those who would mis­use his work and vio­late his copy­right may also find them­selves in court. “It will,” he warns, “cost a lot more than if they had first con­tact­ed me, through my agent, to ask for per­mis­sion.”

Relat­ed Con­tent:

When Deb­bie Har­ry Com­bined Artis­tic Forces with H.R. Giger

The Giger Bar: Dis­cov­er the 1980s Tokyo Bar Designed by H. R. Giger, the Same Artist Who Cre­at­ed the Night­mar­ish Mon­ster in Rid­ley Scott’s Alien

H.R. Giger’s Tarot Cards: The Swiss Artist, Famous for His Design Work on Alien, Takes a Jour­ney into the Occult

Josh Jones is a writer and musi­cian based in Durham, NC. Fol­low him at @jdmagness