A good album cover should compliment the music inside, and a lot of covers do this very well. The ethereal cover of My Bloody Valentine's Loveless matches the album's ethereal music, but some album covers suggest something completely different than what the music actually offers. Here are seven album covers that don't match the album's music.
1. Pink Floyd - Atom Heart Mother (1970)
The cover for Pink Floyd's Atom Heart Mother, designed and photographed by Storm Thorgerson, was actually a deliberate attempt by the band to undermine its typical space-rock imagery. While some of the album's folky tracks sound appropriate with the rural cover, the 23-minute symphonic psych title track doesn't exactly bring cows to mind.
2. Smashing Pumpkins - Mellon Collie and the Infinite Sadness (1995)
About half of the songs on Mellon Collie and the Infinite Sadness, such as "Tonight, Tonight" and "Cupid De Locke," mesh very well with the album's fantastical cover art. However, the other half of the album, consisting of borderline metal tracks such as "Jellybelly" and "Bodies," scream out for something more sinister.
3. The Louvin Brothers - Satan is Real (1959)
If I had to guess what kind of album Satan is Real was based solely on its cover, I would say it was some sort of freaky avant-garde album like the Residents, but it's actually a fairly straightforward (and excellent) country/gospel album from 1959. The cover looks like it would be famously rejected album artwork, like the Beatles' Yesterday and Today.
4. Sunny Day Real Estate - Diary (1994)
Both the music and the album cover of Sunny Day Real Estate's Diary are dark, but in completely different ways. The music inspires the same kind of romantic sadness that the Cure and the Smiths do, but the eerie cover art suggests something more avant-garde or hardcore.
5. The Replacements - Tim (1985)
The music on the Replacement's album Tim doesn't match its album cover because I have no idea what the cover is even supposed to be. There are some people's faces and a long hallway, which doesn't suggest any type of music at all, let alone punky power-pop songs.
6. Neil Young - On the Beach (1974)
Neil Young's done a lot of weird stuff in his time, like releasing a synth-pop album followed immediately by a straight-up rockabilly album, so it's not a stretch to see the cover of On the Beach and think that he chose to record a Beach Boys inspired surf-pop album. However, On the Beach is similar to his other '70s albums with its raw, country rock sound.
7. The Velvet Underground - The Velvet Underground & Nico (1967)
The Velvet Underground may have written some pop songs occasionally, but for the most part, it was an incredibly dark and brutal band for its time. You wouldn't know this based on the Warhol-designed cover of The Velvet Underground & Nico, which doesn't conjure minimalist garage rock so much as it conjures...whatever kind of music monkeys listen to. The songs from The Jungle Book, I suppose.
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