The most recognisable metal album covers
Metal takes album art more seriously than any other genre, and it is not close. The sleeve is part of the record in a way that a pop cover simply isn't — commissioned illustration, recurring characters, artwork designed to be stared at across a gatefold.
It also means metal covers are unusually easy to identify from a sliver, because so many of them are built on one enormous central image.
1. Metallica — Master of Puppets (1986)
Master of PuppetsMetallica · 1986
Rows of white crosses receding into a blood-red sky, puppet strings coming down from above. Two colours and a repeating shape — arguably the most identifiable metal sleeve ever made, and readable from a single tile of that red.
2. Iron Maiden — Powerslave (1984)
PowerslaveIron Maiden · 1984
Derek Riggs's Egyptian temple, with Eddie carved into the stonework. Maiden did something almost no other band managed: a recurring character across every sleeve, so the artwork is a series rather than a set of one-offs.
3. Rainbow — Rising (1976)
RisingRainbow · 1976
A giant fist rising from the sea to grasp a rainbow, under a churning sky. Fantasy illustration was everywhere in seventies hard rock; this is the composition that survived, because there is one enormous form and nothing competing with it.
4. AC/DC — Highway to Hell (1979)
Highway to HellAC/DC · 1979
A band photograph, which ought to make it hard — except Angus Young is in the schoolboy uniform with horns, and that single impossible detail collapses the search space to one record.
5. Black Sabbath — Sabbath Bloody Sabbath (1973)
Sabbath Bloody SabbathBlack Sabbath · 1973
A painted deathbed scene in sickly greens and reds, figures crowded round a bed. Dense and detailed, and identifiable by palette alone — you know it from a patch of background.
6. Slayer — Reign in Blood (1986)
Reign in BloodSlayer · 1986
Larry Carroll's painted collage, murky and deliberately hard to parse. It reads as texture before it reads as image, which is exactly why a fragment gives it away.
7. Megadeth — Rust in Peace (1990)
Rust in PeaceMegadeth · 1990
Vic Rattlehead and a summit of world leaders, in bright illustrated colour. Megadeth ran the same mascot strategy as Maiden, and it works for the same reason.
8. Motörhead — Ace of Spades (1980)
Ace of SpadesMotörhead · 1980
The band as gunslingers in sepia dust. The logo does as much identifying as the photograph — that ornate, spiked wordmark is a design asset in its own right.
9. Iron Maiden — Killers (1981)
KillersIron Maiden · 1981
Eddie again, this time under a streetlamp, axe in hand. Put it beside Powerslave and you can see the strategy: same character, entirely different scene, instantly the same band.
Why metal is easier than it looks
Play the metal collection and you will probably score better than in pop, which surprises people. Three reasons:
Illustration beats photography for recognisability. A painting is a set of deliberate choices; a photograph contains a lot of incidental detail that looks like every other photograph.
Mascots. Eddie, Vic Rattlehead, Snaggletooth. Once you know the character you have narrowed it to one band before you have identified the record.
Colour discipline. Metal sleeves commit hard — the Master of Puppets red, the Reign in Blood murk. A single flat tile of the right colour eliminates thousands of albums.
The genuinely hard ones are the eighties band photographs, where four men in leather against a dark background could be almost anybody.
Browse the metal archive, or take on ten in Genre mode.