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The 100 Best Album Covers of All Time

From biggie to beyoncé to bad bunny, from nirvana to nas to neil young, this is the album art that changed the way we see music.

PHOTO ILLUSTRATION BY MATTHEW COOLEY

The album is the best invention of the past century, hands down — but the music isn’t the whole story. The album cover has been a cultural obsession as long as albums have. Ever since 12-inch vinyl records took off in the 1950s, packaged in cardboard sleeves, musicians have been fascinated by the art that goes on those covers, and so have fans. When the Beatles revolutionized the game with the cover of Sgt. Pepper , in 1967, it became a way to make a visual statement about where the music comes from and why it matters. But the art of the album cover just keeps evolving.

So this is our massive celebration of that art: the 100 best album covers ever, from Biggie to Beyoncé to Bad Bunny, from Nirvana to Nas to Neil Young, from SZA to Sabbath to the Sex Pistols. We’ve got rap, country, jazz, prog, metal, reggae, flamenco, funk, goth, hippie psychedelia, hardcore punk. But all these albums have a unique look to go with the sound. The most unforgettable covers become part of the music — how many Pink Floyd fans have gotten their minds blown staring at the prism on the cover of Dark Side of the Moon , after using it to roll up their smoking materials?

What makes an album cover a classic? Sometimes it’s a portrait of the artist — think of the Beatles crossing the street, or Carole King in Laurel Canyon with her cat. Others go for iconic, semi-abstract images, like Led Zeppelin, Miles Davis, or My Bloody Valentine. Some artists make a statement about where they’re from, whether it’s R.E.M. repping the South with kudzu or Ol’ Dirty Bastard flashing his food-stamps card to salute the Brooklyn Zoo.

Many of these covers come from legendary photographers, designers, and artists, like Andy Warhol, Annie Leibovitz, Storm Thorgerson, Raymond Pettibon, and Peter Saville. Some have cosmic symbolism for fans to decode; others go for star power. But they’re all classic images that have become a crucial part of music history. And they all show why there’s no end to the world’s long-running love affair with albums.

CONTRIBUTORS: David Browne , Jon Dolan , Suzy Exposito , Andy Greene , Kory Grow , Maya Georgi , Maura Johnston , Gabrielle Macafee , Angie Martoccio , Mosi Reeves , Rob Sheffield , Hank Shteamer , Simon Vozick-Levinson , Alison Weinflash , Christopher Weingarten

From Rolling Stone US

Spinal Tap, ‘Smell the Glove’

There was no easy way to discuss “the issue with the cover” of (totally fictitious heavy-metal band) Spinal Tap’s (nonexistent) 1982 album, Smell the Glove, as recounted in a scene from the mockumentary This Is Spinal Tap: “You put a greased, naked woman on all fours, with a dog collar around her neck and a leash, and a man’s arm extended out up to here holding onto the leash, and pushing a black glove in her face to sniff it,” artist-relations rep Bobbi Flekman (Fran Drescher) says. “You don’t find that offensive?” Well, somebody did, so Spinal Tap ended up with an all-black cover. The band members equivocated it by saying it looked like black leather, a black mirror, death, and mourning. Then Nigel Tufnel (Christopher Guest) got it: “There’s something about this that’s so black, it’s like, ‘How much more black could this be?’ And the answer is, ‘None. None more black.’” The joke manifested itself in real life with Spinal Tap’s soundtrack album, a punk band called None More Black, and “Black Albums” from Metallica, Jay-Z, Prince, the Damned, and many others. Plus, Spinal Tap eventually released their original album cover, albeit toned down a little, years later on the sleeve of their single “Bitch School.” —K.G.

Grateful Dead, ‘Europe 72’

Together or separately, the San Francisco artists Alton Kelley and Stanley Mouse made sure that album art for the Grateful Dead was as trippy (1971’s Grateful Dead) or earthy (Workingman’s Dead) as the music inside. Their visuals for the band’s live triple album are among the simplest in Dead album history. The big, clumsy foot about to stomp on Europe is a witty metaphor for the Dead’s wild-eyed series of shows on that continent, and the “fool” smashing an ice-cream cone into his forehead on the back cover is just goofy Dead fun. (It may also be connected to a tale in drummer Bill Kreutzmann’s memoir about the band dumping some ice cream onto an annoying fan.) Even in the land of the Dead, where visual and musical indulgence could rule, Kelley and Mouse realized that sometimes, less is more. —D.B.

Lil Yachty, ‘Lil Boat’

The cover of Lil Yachty’s debut mixtape, Lil Boat, finds the rapper clad in overalls, standing in a small boat in the middle of the ocean. The collage is framed by a red border printed with the numbers 33.7750° N 84.3900° W — coordinates for the Five Points neighborhood in downtown Atlanta — marking the then-18-year-old rap vocalist as the latest manifestation of the city’s fast-moving and highly influential scene. Mihailo Andic, who designed Lil Boat using a photograph provided by Yachty’s management, drew inspiration from Tumblr. “I thought it’d be a great idea to pitch a cover to his management team: Yachty, on a boat, in the middle of nowhere,” he told Green Label in 2016. “My whole style uses retouching and superimposing photos to make them look as one.” —M.R.

Public Image Ltd, ‘Metal Box’

“We were turned on by the idea that it would be difficult to open the can and get the records out,” Public Image Ltd guitarist Keith Levene told author Simon Reynolds in Rip It Up and Start Again. The post-punk pioneers were already blowing apart rock music with their long, repetitive, often improvisatory songs, and Metal Box rethought the album format itself — three 45 rpm LPs to be treated like 12-inch disco singles, all annoyingly crammed into an unwieldy canister. “With Metal Box, the cover came first, both mentally and physically,” frontman John Lydon told Classic Rock. “We spent most of the advance on it, so making Metal Box presented us with a real challenge because we didn’t have any money left for recording sessions.” —C.W.

Phoebe Bridgers, ‘Punisher’

Phoebe Bridgers’ excellent pandemic-era album has a cover that represents everything we were feeling at the time: fear, loneliness, heartbreak, and the secret wish for extraterrestrials to scoop you up into the sky and get you the hell out of here. Bridgers and photographer Olof Grind took a 24-hour road trip through the California desert, scouting for a location. “I always love a good adventure while shooting, and driving out in a pitch-black desert at 3 a.m. on dirt roads definitely added to my excitement,” Grind said. Bridgers made the skeleton suit her signature look, wearing it on the entire Punisher album cycle and tour. And it’s still impossible not to think of Grind’s image when you listen to songs like the gorgeously devastating “Moon Song” and the strangely romantic “Garden Song.” —A.M.

Offset, ‘Set It Off’

Designed and art-directed by Amber Park, the cover image for Offset’s Set It Off shows the Atlanta rapper tumbling through the sky as the world explodes around him. The image represents modern rap’s shift toward Wagnerian-size drama, with Offset as another kind of heroic survivor, outlasting and overcoming his many controversies. He wears sequined socks and gold gloves, which nod toward his fascination with Thriller-era Michael Jackson. And the image is constructed upside down, making it appear like he’s falling into the sky, not out of it. “I wanted it to be an art piece,” he told Our Generation Music. “It’s like I’m falling down but I’m going up.” —M.R.

Slayer, ‘Reign in Blood’

Just how do you illustrate lyrics like “Raining blood from a lacerated sky/Bleeding its horror, creating my structure/Now, I shall reign in blood”? Slayer producer and label head Rick Rubin turned to political cartoonist Larry Carroll, who tapped into his inner Hieronymus Bosch to create a mixed-media representation of hell with a goatlike deity, decapitated heads, and murderous black angels. “If I remember correctly, [Slayer] didn’t like the cover I did for Reign in Blood at first,” Carroll told Revolver in 2010. “But then someone in the band showed it to their mother, and their mother thought it was disgusting, so they knew they were onto something.” Carroll subsequently created similar hellscapes for Slayer’s South of Heaven, Seasons in the Abyss, and Christ Illusion albums, producing some of the scariest covers in music. —K.G.

Slint, ‘Spiderland’

The members of Slint were just teenagers when they came together in drummer Britt Walford’s Louisville,Kentucky, basement to make the eerily expansive indie rock they’d capture on their epochal 1991 sophomore album, Spiderland. That mix of youthful exuberance and youthful aloneness comes through in the album’s black-and-white cover, which shows them smilingly treading water in a local quarry. The photo was taken by their friend Will Oldham, who’d soon be making his own name with Palace Brothers and Bonnie “Prince” Billy. “We’re just all being youthful and happy,” guitarist Dave Pajo told Rolling Stone’s Hank Shteamer years later, describing the band’s attitude at the time. “When you’re younger, everything is so life-and-death and huge.” —J.D.

Lauryn Hill, ‘The Miseducation of Lauryn Hill’

The wood carving at the center of Lauryn Hill’s only official studio album to date is both inspired by artwork for the Wailers’ 1973 album Burnin’ and by the album title itself. “She already had some great ideas that were inspired by the album title,” Columbia art director Erwin Gorostiza told Okayplayer in 2021. The two developed a plan to arrange a photo shoot at Hill’s alma mater, Columbia High School in Maplewood, New Jersey. After photographer Eric Johnson snapped images of her, they decided to select one of them as source material for an illustration that resembles something made by a wayward, “miseducated” student on a school desk. The result vividly reflects Hill’s rustic melding of hip-hop, R&B, and reggae sounds, and her journey to find clarity in a world riven by relationships and desire. —M.R.

Big Brother and the Holding Company, ‘Cheap Thrills’

Counterculture cartoonist Robert “R.” Crumb drew the cover for the 1967 debut by Big Brother and the Holding Company, a psychedelic comic strip that tells the album’s story in each of its songs. The artist laid down the cover after watching the band from backstage at San Francisco’s Carousel Ballroom: “He really wasn’t into our music, but it didn’t matter,” drummer Dave Getz recalled. It really didn’t: Crumb still captured the wild, woolly spirit of Janis Joplin and her bandmates, even if he’d intended for what became the front cover to serve as its back sleeve. —M.J.

Ani DiFranco, ‘Up Up Up Up Up Up’

Modern folk-music icon Ani DiFranco built her enduring success on a mix of anti-capitalist commitment, aesthetic ingenuity, DIY community, and her electric charisma. You can see all of those elements in the multidimensional cover image for her 1999 album. It’s a statement of playful substance over predictable image, but even with her face pointed to the ground she still completely commands your attention. The cover photo was taken by her friend and longtime manager Scot Fisher, who helped DiFranco found the Buffalo, New York-based label Righteous Babe. “We were a mom-and-pop operation,” she recalled in a 2016 interview. “Scot was the photographer and the dude who answered the phone, and I was the graphic designer who would paint the album covers.” —J.D. 

Silkk the Shocker, ‘Charge It 2 Da Game’

The garish, maximalist, larger-than-life album covers of Pen & Pixel defined the late-Nineties CD era, when Southern rap labels like No Limit, Cash Money, and Suave House began to topple the East Coast/West Coast monopoly. Brothers Aaron and Shawn Brauch covered hundreds of album covers with their Photoshop wonderlands of luxury cars, sparkling gems, and bottles of champagne. The cover of Silkk the Shocker’s second album — jeweled lettering, gleaming pinky ring, skewed perspective, gold “Ghetto Express” card — is a classic of the form. “The longer you hold that CD cover in your hand, the more possession-oriented you become,” Shawn told Red Bull. “People would comment later, ‘Yeah, man, the album wack, but the artwork was cool.’ I was like, ‘Well, that’s my job done, right?’” —C.W.

Neil Young, ‘On the Beach’

“Album covers are very important to me,” Neil Young wrote in his 2012 memoir, Waging Heavy Peace. “They put a face on the nature of the project.” This is especially true of 1974’s On the Beach, Young’s devastating rumination on Watergate, the recent breakup of his marriage, his recent albums’ commercial failure, and the overall dissolution of the Sixties dream. It’s all evident on the cover, where he’s seen standing on the Santa Monica shore, his back turned away from the camera. The tail light of a 1959 Cadillac emerges from the sand, surrounded by gaudy yellow patio furniture. The headline from a local L.A. paper reads “Sen. Buckley Calls for Nixon to Resign.” Young spontaneously purchased the items with art director Gary Burden while stoned on “dynamite” weed. —A.M.

Devo, ‘Q: Are We Not Men? A: We Are Devo!’

“What we focused on was inane, mundane, dumb, mass stuff,” said Devo’s Gerald Casale to NBC. “We liked to go to Kmart and Gold Circle because it had all this discount stuff. That’s when I found, in an aisle of discontinued sports goods, the Chi Chi Rodriguez golf-ball package.” For its debut, the band wanted to use the image of the flamboyant golfer they found on a $1.99 box of balls; however, Warner Bros. lawyers intervened. They quickly found a composite photo of four U.S. presidents that Devo’s Mark Mothersbaugh called “perfectly hideous” and had it airbrushed onto Rodriguez’s face. —C.W.

Frank Ocean, ‘Blonde’

The now-iconic photograph of Frank Ocean in the shower as he cups his hand over his face, his hair dyed in lime green, was the result of a lengthy 2015 collaboration between him and German photographer Wolfgang Tillmans. The image plays to both men’s interest in otherness, not only as a sign of queer identity, but also as a method of presenting a distinctly iconoclastic yet public self. Ocean and Tillmans were brought together for a photo shoot by the fashion magazine Fantastic Man. Blonde introduced Tillmans, who had been documenting underground culture since the Eighties, to a new generation. It also introduced a defining image of the singer, one both invitingly mysterious and alluringly unknowable. —M.R.

Minor Threat, ‘Minor Threat’

Minor Threat epitomized American hardcore punk at its most fiercely independent. You see that spirit in the classic image of singer Ian MacKaye’s brother Alec sleeping on the steps of Dischord House, where so many of the D.C. punk kids lived and where the band ran their label. Alec’s shaved head, his scuffed work boots, his rumpled clothes, his folded arms, his punked-out exhaustion — it summed up the whole ethos of Minor Threat. The image has been a symbol of DIY realness ever since, inspiring many tributes, most famously the cover of Rancid’s 1995 …And Out Come the Wolves. No wonder corporate America wanted a piece — Nike tried to appropriate it for their bizarre 2005 “Major Threat” ad campaign, until public outrage shut it down. —R.S.

Jay-Z, ‘The Blueprint’

For The Blueprint, Jay-Z turned to Jonathan Mannion, a photographer who had shot all of Jay’s covers since his 1996 debut, Reasonable Doubt. Mannion took inspiration from Jocelyn Bain Hogg, a British photographer who snapped South London gangster Dave Courtney giving a lecture at Oxford Union, for his book The Firm. Mannion’s shot replicates the aerial framing, finding Jay-Z looking away from the camera, holding court over a group of minions only identified by their shoes. Designer Jason Noto of Def Jam’s in-house creative department the Drawing Board cast the entire image in faded blues and grays. In 2021, Jay sued Mannion over prints the photographer sold from their many sessions. The two settled out of court in 2023. —M.R.

Taylor Swift, ‘Folklore’

Taylor Swift stepped back from her songs on her eighth album: “I found myself not only writing my own stories, but also writing about or from the perspective of people I’ve never met, people I’ve known, or those I wish I hadn’t,” she posted upon Folklore’s release in 2020. Its striking monochromatic cover — a departure from the candy-coated Lover front, and the first collaboration between Swift and photographer Beth Garrabrant — is similarly situated in the wide world, with the coat-clad singer seeming tiny amid mist-cloaked trees and mossy terrain, gazing upward with a pondering expression. —M.J.   

Shakira, ‘Dónde Están los Ladrones?’

After wrapping up her 1997 Pies Descalzos Tour, Shakira landed in Bogotá, Columbia, to discover her briefcase had been stolen … and in it, the songs she’d written for her next album. She’d decidedly named her 1998 record “Dónde Están los Ladrones?” or “Where Are the Thieves?” — and conceptualized the theft as an allegory for thefts of all kinds, including that of Columbia by corrupt politicians, drug lords, and paramilitaries, during what’s since been described as the “Dirty Wars.” Shot against a statement hot pink, Shakira posed for her album cover donning edgy purple braids, with extended dirt-covered palms. “The dirty hands represent the shared guilt,” she said of her cover. “No one is completely clean.… In the end, we are all accomplices.” —S.E.

King Crimson, ‘In the Court of the Crimson King’

King Crimson knew they were onto something big when they pieced together “21st Century Schizoid Man,” the snarling, sweeping portrait of an unraveling collective consciousness that would open their 1969 debut LP. And when artist Barry Godber dropped by London’s Wessex Studios to show them the cover painting that lyricist Peter Sinfield had commissioned, they knew they’d found the perfect visual counterpart. “This fucking face screamed up from the floor, and what it said to us was ‘schizoid man’ — the very track we’d been working on,” bassist-vocalist Greg Lake later recalled. Pairing the image with lyrics like “Blood rack, barbed wire/Politicians’ funeral pyre/Innocents raped with napalm fire,” it’s hardly a leap to imagine the cover figure looking on in horror at the atrocities the song describes. —H.S.

Weyes Blood, ‘Titanic Rising’

On the cover of Titanic Rising, Natalie Mering — the California singer-songwriter who records as Weyes Blood — appears inside an eerie deep-sea installation, hovering between a brass bed and a white wicker desk, with posters adorning the walls. The image perfectly captures the themes of Titanic Rising: millennial doom, the climate crisis, the isolation of technology, and water itself. “This bullshit initiation into culture — for most young people in the Westernized world, it’s their bedroom,” she told Rolling Stone. “They hang up posters of their favorite celebrities and their favorite movies, and they formulate these ideas about life and what life should be like, and what they want. And it’s all an incubation of capitalist bullshit. But it’s still very sacred.” —A.M.

Lil Wayne, ‘Tha Carter III’

“I’m going to be so honest with you: I don’t know Tha Carter III, Tha Carter II, Tha Carter One from Tha Carter IV. And that’s just my God’s honest truth,” Lil Wayne told RS last year. “I believe that [God] blessed me with this amazing mind, but would not give [me] an amazing memory to remember this amazing shit.” Fair enough. But the cover of Tha Carter III, Wayne’s best album, is unforgettable. Rappers have made iconic album artwork using baby photos before — think Ready to Die, Illmatic — but Wayne took it a step further, giving Baby Weezy a diamond pinky ring and some facial ink, for an image that summed up the unstoppable, no-fucks-given charm that made him a superstar. “We wanted to bring something new to it,” art director Scott Sandler said. “What if we put the tats on the baby?” —A.M.

New York Dolls, ‘New York Dolls’

Rolling Stone’s review of the New York Dolls’ 1973 self-titled debut refers to the punk pioneers as “mutant children of the hydrogen age.” This comes across perfectly on the album cover, which shows the androgynous quartet slumped together on a couch, slathered in makeup and hairspray. It was created by Vogue photographer Toshi Matsuo after the Dolls nixed a plan by their label to shoot them near vintage dolls in an antique shop, sans makeup. “That couch we were sitting on, we found that on the street and brought it up,” said guitarist Sylvain Sylvain. “We put the white fabric on it — I remember tacking it on.” The look was so ahead of its time that imitators wouldn’t come along until hair metal arrived a decade later. —A.G.

The Smiths, ‘The Queen Is Dead’

Throughout the Smiths’ feverishly productive run in the mid-Eighties, lead singer Morrissey selected photo stills depicting midcentury movies and pop-culture moments for their singles and albums. His pick for the Smith’s third album, The Queen Is Dead, may be their most iconic: an image of French superstar Alain Delon in the film L’Insoumis, lying in distress. The concept of this beautifully handsome yet controversially macho star — the Brad Pitt of the Sixties — as a “queen” nods toward Morrissey’s subversive sense of humor. The layout, handled by Rough Trade’s Caryn Gough, casts the photo in shades of dark green, making Delon appear as a doomed royal in their death throes. —M.R.

Tyler, the Creator, ‘Igor’

The cover for Tyler, the Creator’s fifth solo album is striking in its minimalism: a pained close-up of the California-born polymath combined with a typewriter-font assertion that he was responsible for all the album’s sonics, and a salmon backdrop that feels aggressive despite its pastel hue. Igor further established Tyler as an artist willing to push himself into new realms, and the cover announces that to anyone flipping through a collection. “We work well together because I believe in what he wants to create,” photographer Luis “Pancho” Perez, who worked with Tyler to create the cover, told Complex in 2019. “Nothing has really changed his confidence in himself.” —M.J.

Radiohead, ‘Kid A’

At the close of the 20th century, Radiohead were an acclaimed British rock band desperate to be anything else. That jittery unease fueled the artwork that Thom Yorke created with his old friend Stanley Donwood, riffing on ancient mythology and paranoid dreams in late-night sessions. “There was an air of chaos suddenly, and that was really fun,” Yorke told Rolling Stone years later. The cover they chose for Kid A has all the unsettling intensity of the music Yorke was making with his bandmates: an icy, forbidding mountain range, like something out of a digital nightmare. “It was almost a dark fairyland,” Donwood said. “A very lonely, cold, and quiet place, apart from the punctuations of terrible war.” —S.V.L.

Blur, ‘Parklife’

Designers Rob O’Connor and Chris Thompson took to London’s streets for inspiration as they were brainstorming a cover for what would go on to be Blur’s era-defining 1994 album. While peering in the window of a betting lounge for sports-related ideas, they found a concept that had bite: “We centered in on the greyhounds,” Blur guitarist Graham Coxon told Brit-pop chronicler Dylan Jones in 2022’s Faster Than a Cannonball, “because they had an aggressiveness we liked. We chose the ones with the most teeth. They look deranged, just longing to kill, and there’s a bizarre look in their faces. You just don’t get that look with a footballer — well, maybe a little bit.” The image of racing dogs underscored the hunger of the best Brit-pop, and set Blur apart from their more glam-minded peers. —M.J.

Willie Nelson, ‘Red Headed Stranger’

On his legendary 1975 opus, Red Headed Stranger, Willie Nelson tells the tale of a preacher on the run after killing his own child and unfaithful wife. Nelson stepped into the role of an outlaw on the cover (designed by Monica White), which showed his unruly image framed in the style of a ‘Wanted’ poster. Red Headed Stranger was country music’s first concept album, a watershed for the outlaw-country movement that included Waylon Jennings and Kris Kristofferson, and its cover went a long way toward creating the subgenre’s rough-hewn iconography.  —G.M.

Billie Eilish, ‘When We All Fall Asleep, Where Do We Go?’

Just like the music, the cover of Bille Eilish’s classic debut drops you right into her creepy-crawly teenage nightmares. Photographer Kenneth Cappello collaborated with Eilish on a 12-hour shoot, ending up with a deeply unsettling shot of Eilish sitting on bed, her eyes entirely white, pupils obscured. Eilish brought in sketches of her inspirations for the cover, which included the Babadook. (“I got so much inspiration from The Babadook,” she told Rolling Stone in 2019.) “She’s all in,” Cappello told MTV News. “Those wide eyes? Those aren’t in post, those are contacts. She goes all in on everything.”

FKA Twigs, ‘LP1’

The hauntingly plastic visage of British musician FKA Twigs dominates the cover of LP1, a bizarre representation of her disturbingly mutant electronic pop. It was constructed by Jesse Kanda, who met her via his longtime friend and collaborator Arca. “We did the front cover for her album in my room, with my shitty lights, and no people running around. I have the most control when I do everything myself,” he told Dazed in 2014. He sculpted a photograph of her using 3D technology, manipulating and warping the image, then painted over the results. Longtime XL Recordings art director Phil Lee and Twigs collaborated on the aquamarine blue design that spotlighted Kanda’s imagery. In 2015, the cover earned a Grammy nomination for Best Recording Package. —M.R.

Grace Jones, ‘Nightclubbing’

The famous Nightclubbing photo of Grace Jones dressed in an Armani suit, a cigarette dangling from her lips, was the culmination of a tempestuous personal and professional relationship between her and photographer Jean-Paul Goude. The image seemed as much a cheeky New Wave commentary on corporate Eighties style as an exercise in gender-bending fashion. But despite observers’ claims (and criticism) of how Goude crafted and manipulated her image, Jones has always asserted that she was in control of the process. “Jean-Paul would say, later…that he had created me,” she wrote in her 2015 autobiography, I’ll Never Write My Memoirs. “I knew that wasn’t the case, that I was creating myself before I met him.”–M.R.

R.E.M., ‘Murmur’

Lots of Southern bands had used pastoral imagery on their album covers to underscore their music’s down-home difference. R.E.M. flipped the script with the cover of their debut, Murmur. The front image shows a goth-y woods overrun by kudzu — a weed that grows so fast it covers and kills any plant in its way. The back image is of a disused train trestle near the band’s hometown of Athens, Georgia. Taken together, it was a perfect reflection of the band’s mysterious, enveloping sound. The “Murmur Trestle” immediately became part of local lore, defended by R.E.M. fans when it was approved for demolition in 2019. “Why do they need to preserve it?” said photographer Sandra-Lee Phipps, who took both photos. “It was just done randomly. Somehow it ended up mattering to people.” —J.D.

Van Halen, ‘1984’

When Warner Bros. designer Margo Nahas heard Van Halen’s original concept for the cover of their sixth LP — four dancing women made out of chrome — she quickly passed. (Already a seasoned illustrator of chrome, she “couldn’t imagine doing all the reflections,” she later said.) But when her husband, fellow designer Jay Vigon, brought her portfolio to the band, they were instantly drawn to her now-iconic painting of an angelic baby grinning and holding a smoke, which she’d modeled off a friend’s son. “I took a picture of him, took him candy cigarettes, which he proceeded to eat, every single one, after a brief tantrum, of course,” Nahas recalled in 2020. The impish yet innocent image encapsulated the lovable mischief of the band’s “Hot for Teacher” era. —H.S.

Lorde, ‘Melodrama’

For her highly-anticipated sophomore album, Lorde crafted a delicate cover that evoked Melodrama’s emotional heft. Painted by the Brooklyn artist Sam McKinnis — whom Lorde connected with via a fangirling email — and inspired by an image that McKinnis had made riffing on the cover of Prince’s Purple Rain, the cover is based on a photograph McKinnis took of Lorde as she lay in bed. Drenched in the shadows of a moody, electric blue that could swatch a dance floor or the walls of a club bathroom, with warm cracks of daybreak creeping on Lorde’s cheek, the image depicts her in the morning after a night of dancing with “all the heartache and treason” she sang about on the album. —M.G.

Marvin Gaye, ‘Here, My Dear’

There are breakup albums, and then there’s Here, My Dear, Marvin Gaye’s brutally honest unpacking of his in-progress divorce from his first wife, Anna Gordy. The serene front cover shows Gaye depicted as a Roman statue, standing in front of a lavish temple — its cornerstone bearing the inscription “Love and Marriage” — next to a sculpture of embracing lovers. But by the time you see the back-cover image, the sculpture and the temple have caught fire and are actively crumbling, and the inscription on the building now reads “Pain and Divorce.” If all that weren’t bleak enough, on the inner sleeve, we see a couple’s hands engaged in a Monopoly-like board game, with all their earthly possessions at stake between them, and the scales of justice looming ominously in the background. —H.S.

DJ Shadow, ‘Endtroducing’

DJ Shadow’s 1996 debut LP was constructed almost entirely out of samples, a love letter to funky, crackly old vinyl that was released into a world where most record stores only sold CDs. The cover image shows two of Shadow’s buddies from the Bay Area hip-hop label SoulSides, producer Chief Xcel and rapper Lyrics Born, going through the stacks at Records, a local institution (now closed) that billed itself as “a speciality shop dealing in out-of-print phonograph records.” As Shadow said of the store in the documentary Scratch, “Just being in here is a humbling experience because you’re looking through all these records, and it’s sort of like a big pile of broken dreams, in a way.” —J.D.

Sonny Rollins, ‘Way Out West’

“I was really living out my Lone Ranger thing,” Sonny Rollins said in 2009, reflecting on his Western-themed classic Way Out West. He wanted a cover that evoked the Westerns he grew up on, so photographer William Claxton suggested they pick up a ten-gallon hat, a holster, and a steer’s skull and head to the Mojave Desert, where he shot Rollins holding his saxophone and staring down the camera like a hardened cowboy. Some were critical of what they saw as the photo’s hokey premise and incorrectly assumed that Rollins was pressured into it. “Many people thought wrongly over the years that I was asked to pose that way or that the material was forced on me, because California was thought to be a movie place and a commercial place,” he said. “Not true. I was given complete control.” —H.S.

Janet Jackson, ‘The Velvet Rope’

With its themes of self-care, depression, and the then-taboo exploration of Black female queerness, The Velvet Rope may be Janet Jackson’s most intimate full-length work. Ironically, its cover depicts her clothed, not topless as on the Patrick Demarchelier-photographed shot on her previous album, 1993’s Janet. Photographer Ellen von Unwerth captured Jackson dressed in a black turtleneck with her head pointed downward. Meanwhile, the deep-red background tipped her audience to the burning emotions inside Jackson, as if she’s struggling to get it all out. (The interior photographs, shot by von Unwerth and Mario Testino, are more risqué.) “You know people they still ask me about it,” said von Unwerth of the enigmatic cover. “It became more iconic in a way.” —M.R.

My Bloody Valentine, ‘Loveless’

Swoosh-y abstraction was a go-to look for turn-of-the-Nineties shoegaze bands like Ride, Slowdive, and Swervedriver. But those bands usually worked in moody blues and grays. My Bloody Valentine’s choice of hot pink (a color you were more likely to see on a Poison record) for the cover of their 1990 masterpiece Loveless grabbed your eye with a look as undeniably loud as the band’s stomach-rattling guitar swells. MBV mastermind Kevin Shields and visual artist Angus Cameron collaborated on the image, taking a screengrab of Shields’ hands on his guitar from the band’s Cameron-directed “Too Shallow” video and turning it into a blur of radiant abstraction. —J.D.

Beastie Boys, ‘Licensed to Ill’

The cover of the Beastie Boys’ debut is as brash and playfully referential as the Beasties’ sound. Producer Rick Rubin got the idea for the cover — a Boeing 727 with a Beastie Boys logo and a tail number that, viewed in the mirror, says “eat me” — while reading through the Led Zeppelin bio Hammer of the Gods and spying a photo of the band’s private jet. “I wanted to embrace and somehow distinguish,” he said in the book 100 Best Album Covers, “in a sarcastic way, the larger than life rock & roll lifestyle.” Artists Stephen Byram and World B. Omes crafted the gatefold cover with a surprise in mind — at first it looks almost majestic, but when seen in full, the plane is revealed to have crashed, its front end crumpled. The resulting image provides another layer of irony: The plane, many have noted, looks like a joint smashed in an ashtray.

Joni Mitchell, ‘Hejira’

Joni Mitchell wrote Hejira while traveling cross-country, so she could have slapped a photo of an open road on the cover and called it a day. Instead, it was only the beginning. The sleek road sits inside a black-and-white Norman Seeff portrait of Mitchell, “haunted, like a Bergman figure,” wearing a beret and holding a cigarette. Around 14 photos were used for the cover and sleeves — including figure skater Toller Cranston out on the ice, to complete the wintry vibe — and an airbrush was used to make the images on the cover look like one cohesive illustration. The effort paid off, creating a beautifully intricate album cover to represent delicate tracks like “Amelia” and “Song for Sharon.” Looking back, Mitchell said it’s her favorite cover of hers: “A lot of work went into that.” —A.M.

Sonic Youth, ‘Goo’

Sonic Youth’s long run as the official band of America’s avant-garde art scene means that their catalog is full of iconic images, like Daydream Nation’s Gerhard Richter candle painting and Dirty’s Mike Kelley rag doll. But none are as enduring as the black-and-white sketch that SoCal punk legend Raymond Pettibon contributed to Goo. The pair of impossibly cool young sociopaths and their neo-noir tale of sex and death have been endlessly memed since then, but back in 1990, they made execs at the band’s new major-label home nervous — which was kind of the point. “That was so important at the time,” Lee Ranaldo later told biographer David Browne. “In a way, we were still in that world … that our ‘scene’ was making.” —S.V.L.

Rosalía, ‘El Mal Querer’

Rosalía tapped a longtime internet friend, the Spanish Croatian artist Filip Ćustić, to conceive what he’s described as a “visual universe” for her 2018 flamenco-pop masterwork, El Mal Querer. The two chatted over Whatsapp to devise an image for each track that would “update Spanish imagery to the 21st century.” In consistency with the record’s theme, Ćustić depicts Rosalía as an ethereal queen of the seraphs, a symbol of the divine feminine, liberated from the tyranny of a controlling man. “She emerges naked from the heavens, as if she were a goddess more than a virgin, saying, ‘This is me, and this has been my learning process,’” explained Ćustić in Spanish newspaper El Pais. —S.E.

Lana Del Rey, ‘Norman Fucking Rockwell’

On the cover of her sixth album, Lana Del Rey seems to be pulling us into her world of deconstructed American myths, as she clings to the Kennedy-esque figure of Jack Nicholson’s grandson Duke Nicholson. From its oil-painted blue sky to Del Rey’s bright-green nylon jacket, the image’s retro-modern feel perfectly reflects the way the music inside offers her own 2010s vision of fading Laurel Canyon glory. The cover photo was taken by Del Rey’s sister, Caroline “Chuck” Grant, who has collaborated with the singer on a number of music videos and photo shoots (including a 2023 cover of Rolling Stone UK). “She captures what I consider to be the visual equivalent of what I do sonically,” Del Rey said in a 2014 interview. —G.M.

T. Rex, ‘Electric Warrior’

Few rock sleeves feel as purposefully barren as the Electric Warrior cover, which finds glam god Marc Bolan suspended, along with his guitar and amp, in what might as well be an interstellar void. Using a live-image shot by Kieron Murphy, Hipgnosis designers Storm Thorgerson and Aubrey Powell added a striking gold halo that helped turn Bolan into a visual icon at precisely the point when he was completing his metamorphosis from flower-child folkie to consummate rock & roll dandy. “Black and gold, the metal guru in full force,” Beck once wrote of one of his favorite album-art specimens. “This is what we want a rock cover to look like.” —H.S.

A Tribe Called Quest, ‘The Low End Theory’

The cover of A Tribe Called Quest’s second album features an unnamed model photographed by Joe Grant. She’s kneeling in black shadows, her body covered in green and red paint. It’s partly inspired by Ohio Players’ memorable 1970s run of covers that depicted women in freaky and suggestive positions. “I wanted a white background for the shot, but they flipped it and made it black,” said group leader Q-Tip in the 2005 book Rakim Told Me. All of the Low End Theory’s visual elements, from the woman in body paint to the red-black-green color scheme reminiscent of the Pan-African flag, became defining elements for Tribe moving forward, and a signature for their deep-rooted and jazz-inflected bohemian sound. —M.R.

Björk, ‘Homogenic’

The making of Homogenic was a fraught time for Björk, as she adjusted to a new level of global fame and the suicide of Ricardo López, a disturbed fan who mailed a letter bomb to her London home. After spotting a striking fashion photo created by photographer Nick Knight and designer Alexander McQueen, she enlisted them to sum up the various emotional currents in her life in an arresting hyperreal portrait. The blend of cultural elements — a Japanese kimono, a European manicure, Maasai neck rings, and a Hopi “butterfly whorl” hairstyle — reflected Björk’s perception of herself as a global citizen. As she later said: “We were trying to make this person that was under a lot of restraint, like long manicure, neckpiece, headpiece, contact lenses — still trying to keep the strength.” —H.S.

Judas Priest, ‘British Steel’

Judas Priest guitarist Glenn Tipton put in his time at the British Steel Corporation, working for the steel producer for five years before his band — who produce a different kind of heavy metal — decided to name their sixth album, British Steel. The title clicked with art director Rosław Szaybo and photographer Bob Elsdale, who created a giant razor blade out of aluminum with the band’s logo on it. Szaybo volunteered to hold it for the shot. “A lot of people looked at it and were really quite horrified,” Elsdale told Revolver. “The edges of the blade seemed to be cutting into Rosław’s flesh, because he was really gripping it quite hard. But that wasn’t the case — it actually had blunt edges. It wasn’t bloody, but it had an element of drama.” —K.G.

Sleater-Kinney, ‘The Hot Rock’

“It’s a labyrinthine record,” Carrie Brownstein wrote of Sleater-Kinney’s fourth LP, The Hot Rock, in her memoir, “sad, fractious, not a victory lap, but speaking to uncertainty.” Following up on their 1997 breakthrough, Dig Me Out, Brownstein, Corin Tucker, and Janet Weiss were working through interpersonal struggles while facing more scrutiny than ever before. The cover photo by Marina Chavez, showing the band standing on a Portland, Oregon, street corner, captures that heavy energy: Tucker and Weiss each stare toward the curb, the drummer looking almost trepidatious, while Brownstein holds up her hand, hailing a cab, her face bearing a disgruntled expression. Like the jewel thieves in the 1972 heist film that gave the album its name, the trio had no choice but to get a move on and meet their moment. —H.S.

David Bowie, ‘Diamond Dogs’

David Bowie closed out his glam era with the decadent apocalyptic excess of Diamond Dogs, a concept album set in a crumbling America of the future. “When we got to Diamond Dogs,” he later said, “that was when it was out of control.” The deranged spirit extended to its cover, designed by Belgian artist Guy Peellaert, which depicted Bowie as a grotesque half-man/half-dog, including genitals on his twisted body. Bowie’s pose on the cover was inspired by a 1926 photo of singer Josephine Baker. Just as the album was ready to get shipped to retailers, Bowie’s record label pulled the cover and had it airbrushed into something less offensive. Some copies did make it out, and Diamond Dogs remains the most provocative album cover of Bowie’s career. —G.M.

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Lil Yachty On His Big Rock Pivot: ‘F-ck Any of the Albums I Dropped Before This One’

With his adventurous, psychedelic new album, 'Let's Start Here,' he's left mumble rap behind — and finally created a project he's proud of.

By Lyndsey Havens

Lyndsey Havens

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Lil Yachty, presented by Doritos, will perform at Billboard Presents The Stage at SXSW on March 16 .

Lil Yachty: Photos From the Billboard Cover Shoot

Someone has sparked a blunt in the planetarium.

It may be a school night, but no one has come to the Liberty Science Center in Jersey City, N.J., to learn. Instead, the hundreds of fans packed into the domed theater on Jan. 26 have come to hear Lil Yachty’s latest album as he intended: straight through — and with an open mind. Or, as Yachty says with a mischievous smile: “I hope y’all took some sh-t.”

For the next 57 minutes and 16 seconds, graphics of exploding spaceships, green giraffes and a quiet road through Joshua Tree National Park accompany Yachty’s sonically divergent — and at this point, unreleased — fifth album, Let’s Start Here . For a psychedelic rock project that plays like one long song, the visual aids not only help attendees embrace the bizarre, but also function as a road map for Yachty’s far-out trip, signaling that there is, in fact, a tracklist.

It’s a night the artist has arguably been waiting for his whole career — to finally release an album he feels proud of. An album that was, he says, made “from scratch” with all live instrumentation. An album that opens with a nearly seven-minute opus, “the BLACK seminole.,” that he claims he had to fight most of his collaborative team to keep as one, not two songs. An album that, unlike his others, has few features and is instead rich with co-writers like Mac DeMarco, Nick Hakim, Alex G and members of MGMT, Unknown Mortal Orchestra and Chairlift. An album he believes will finally earn him the respect and recognition he has always sought.

Sitting in a Brooklyn studio in East Williamsburg not far from where he made most of Let’s Start Here in neighboring Greenpoint, it’s clear he has been waiting to talk about this project in depth for some time. Yachty is an open book, willing to answer anything — and share any opinion. (Especially on the slice of pizza he has been brought, which he declares “tastes like ass.”) Perhaps his most controversial take at the moment? “F-ck any of the albums I dropped before this one.”

His desire to move on from his past is understandable. When Yachty entered the industry in his mid-teens with his 2016 major-label debut, the Lil Boat mixtape, featuring the breakout hit “One Night,” he found that along with fame came sailing the internet’s choppy waters. Skeptics often took him to task for not knowing — or caring, maybe — about rap’s roots, and he never shied away from sharing hot takes on Twitter. With his willingness and ability to straddle pop and hip-hop, Yachty produced music he once called “bubble-gum trap” (he has since denounced that phrase) that polarized audiences and critics. Meanwhile, his nonchalant delivery got him labeled as a mumble rapper — another identifier he was never fond of because it felt dismissive of his talent.

“There’s a lot of kids who haven’t heard any of my references,” he continues. “They don’t know anything about Bon Iver or Pink Floyd or Black Sabbath or James Brown. I wanted to show people a different side of me — and that I can do anything, most importantly.”

Let’s Start Here is proof. Growing up in Atlanta, the artist born Miles McCollum was heavily influenced by his father, a photographer who introduced him to all kinds of sounds. Yachty, once easily identifiable by his bright red braids, found early success by posting songs like “One Night” to SoundCloud, catching the attention of Kevin “Coach K” Lee, co-founder/COO of Quality Control Music, now home to Migos, Lil Baby and City Girls. In 2015, Coach K began managing Yachty, who in summer 2016 signed a joint-venture deal with Motown, Capitol Records and Quality Control.

“Yachty was me when I was 18 years old, when I signed him. He was actually me,” says Coach K today. (In 2021, Adam Kluger, whose clients include Bhad Bhabie, began co-managing Yachty.) “All the eclectic, different things, we shared that with each other. He had been wanting to make this album from the first day we signed him. But you know — coming as a hip-hop artist, you have to play the game.”

Yachty played it well. To date, he has charted 17 songs on the Billboard Hot 100 , including two top 10 hits for his features on DRAM’s melodic 2016 smash “Broccoli” and Kyle’s 2017 pop-rap track “iSpy.” His third-highest-charting entry arrived unexpectedly last year: the 93-second “Poland,” a track Yachty recorded in about 10 minutes where his warbly vocals more closely resemble singing than rapping. ( Let’s Start Here collaborator SADPONY saw “Poland” as a temperature check that proved “people are going to like this Yachty.”)

Beginning with 2016’s Lil Boat mixtape, all eight of Yachty’s major-label-released albums and mixtapes have charted on the Billboard 200 . Three have entered the top 10, including Let’s Start Here , which debuted and peaked at No. 9. And while Yachty has only scored one No. 1 album before ( Teenage Emotions topped Rap Album Sales), Let’s Start Here debuted atop three genre charts: Top Rock & Alternative Albums , Top Rock Albums and Top Alternative Albums .

“It feels good to know that people in that world received this so well,” says Motown Records vp of A&R Gelareh Rouzbehani. “I think it’s a testament to Yachty going in and saying, ‘F-ck what everyone thinks. I’m going to create something that I’ve always wanted to make — and let us hope the world f-cking loves it.’ ”

Yet despite Let’s Start Here ’s many high-profile supporters, some longtime detractors and fans alike were quick to criticize certain aspects of it, from its art — Yachty quote-tweeted one remark , succinctly replying, “shut up” — to the music itself. Once again, he found himself facing another tidal wave of discourse. But this time, he was ready to ride it. “This release,” Kluger says, “gave him a lot of confidence.”

“I was always kind of nervous to put out music, but now I’m on some other sh-t,” Yachty says. “It was a lot of self-assessing and being very real about not being happy with where I was musically, knowing I’m better than where I am. Because the sh-t I was making did not add up to the sh-t I listened to.

“I just wanted more,” he continues. “I want to be remembered. I want to be respected.”

Last spring, Lil Yachty gathered his family, collaborators and team at famed Texas studio complex Sonic Ranch.

“I remember I got there at night and drove down because this place is like 30 miles outside El Paso,” Coach K says. “I walked in the room and just saw all these instruments and sh-t, and the vibe was just so ill. And I just started smiling. All the producers were in the room, his assistant, his dad. Yachty comes in, puts the album on. We got to the second song, and I told everybody, ‘Stop the music.’ I walked over to him and just said, ‘Man, give me a hug.’ I was like, ‘Yachty, I am so proud of you.’ He came into the game bold, but [to make] this album, you have to be very bold. And to know that he finally did it, it was overwhelming.”

SADPONY (aka Jeremiah Raisen) — who executive-produced Let’s Start Here and, in doing so, spent nearly eight straight months with Yachty — says the time at Sonic Ranch was the perfect way to cap off the months of tunnel vision required while making the album in Brooklyn. “That was new alone,” says Yachty. “I’ve recorded every album in Atlanta at [Quality Control]. That was the first time I recorded away from home. First time I recorded with a new engineer,” Miles B.A. Robinson, a Saddle Creek artist.

Yachty couldn’t wait to put it out, and says he turned it in “a long time ago. I think it was just label sh-t and trying to figure out the right time to release it.” For Coach K, it was imperative to have the physical product ready on release date, given that Yachty had made “an experience” of an album. And lately, most pressing plants have an average turnaround time of six to eight months.

Fans, however, were impatient. On Christmas, one month before Let’s Start Here would arrive, the album leaked online. It was dubbed Sonic Ranch . “Everyone was home with their families, so no one could pull it off the internet,” recalls Yachty. “That was really depressing and frustrating.”

Then, weeks later, the album art, tracklist and release date also leaked. “My label made a mistake and sent preorders to Amazon too early, and [the site] posted it,” Yachty says. “So I wasn’t able to do the actual rollout for my album that I wanted to. Nothing was a secret anymore. It was all out. I had a whole plan that I had to cancel.” He says the biggest loss was various videos he made to introduce and contextualize the project, all of which “were really weird … [But] I wasn’t introducing it anymore. People already knew.” Only one, called “Department of Mental Tranquility,” made it out, just days before the album.

Yachty says he wasn’t necessarily seeking a mental escape before making Let’s Start Here , but confesses that acid gave him one anyway. “I guess maybe the music went along with it,” he says. The album title changed four or five times, he says, from Momentary Bliss (“It was meant to take you away from reality … where you’re truly listening”) to 180 Degrees (“Because it’s the complete opposite of anything I’ve ever done, but people were like, ‘It’s too on the nose’ ”) to, ultimately, Let’s Start Here — the best way, he decided, to succinctly summarize where he was as an artist: a seven-year veteran, but at 25 years old, still eager to begin a new chapter.

Taking inspiration from Dark Side , Yachty relied on three women’s voices throughout the album, enlisting Fousheé, Justine Skye and Diana Gordon. Otherwise, guest vocals are spare. Daniel Caesar features on album closer “Reach the Sunshine.,” while the late Bob Ross (of The Joy of Painting fame) has a historic posthumous feature on “We Saw the Sun!”

Rouzbehani tells Billboard that Ross’ estate declined Yachty’s request at first: “I think a big concern of theirs was that Yachty is known as a rapper, and Bob Ross and his brand are very clean. They didn’t want to associate with anything explicit.” But Yachty was adamant, and Rouzbehani played the track for Ross’ team and also sent the entire album’s lyrics to set the group at ease. “With a lot of back-and-forth, we got the call,” she says. “Yachty is the first artist that has gotten a Bob Ross clearance in history.”

From the start, Coach K believed Let’s Start Here would open lots of doors for Yachty — and ultimately, other artists, too. Questlove may have said it best, posting the album art on Instagram with a lengthy caption that read in part: “this lp might be the most surprising transition of any music career I’ve witnessed in a min, especially under the umbrella of hip hop … Sh-t like this (envelope pushing) got me hyped about music’s future.”

Recently, Lil Yachty held auditions for an all-women touring band. “It was an experience for like Simon Cowell or Randy [Jackson],” he says, offering a simple explanation for the choice: “In my life, women are superheroes.”

And according to Yachty, pulling off his show will take superhuman strength: “Because the show has to match the album. It has to be big.” As eager as he was to release Let’s Start Here , he’s even more antsy to perform it live — but planning a tour, he says, required gauging the reaction to it. “This is so new for me, and to be quite honest with you, the label [didn’t] know how [the album] would do,” he says. “Also, I haven’t dropped an album in like three years. So we don’t even know how to plan a tour right now because it has been so long and my music is so different.”

While Yachty’s last full-length studio album, Lil Boat 3 , arrived in 2020, he released the Michigan Boy Boat mixtape in 2021, a project as reverential of the state’s flourishing hip-hop scenes in Detroit and Flint as Let’s Start Here is of its psych-rock touchstones. And though he claims he doesn’t do much with his days, his recent accomplishments, both musical and beyond, suggest otherwise. He launched his own cryptocurrency, YachtyCoin, at the end of 2020; signed his first artist, Draft Day, to his Concrete Boyz label at the start of 2021; invested in the Jewish dating app Lox Club; and launched his own line of frozen pizza, Yachty’s Pizzeria, last September. (He has famously declared he has never eaten a vegetable; at his Jersey City listening event, there was an abundance of candy, doughnut holes and Frosted Brown Sugar Cinnamon Pop-Tarts.)

But there are only two things that seem to remotely excite him, first and foremost of which is being a father. As proud as he is of Let’s Start Here , he says it comes in second to having his now 1-year-old daughter — though he says with a laugh that she “doesn’t really give a f-ck” about his music yet. “I haven’t played [this album] for her, but her mom plays her my old stuff,” he continues. “The mother of my child is Dominican and Puerto Rican, so she loves Selena — she plays her a lot . [We watch] the Selena movie with Jennifer Lopez a sh-t ton and a lot of Disney movie sh-t, like Frozen , Lion King and that type of vibe.”

Aside from being a dad, he most cares about working with other artists. Recently, he flew eight of his biggest fans — most of whom he has kept in touch with for years — to Atlanta. He had them over, played Let’s Start Here , took them to dinner and bowling, introduced them to his mom and dad, and then showed them a documentary he made for the album. (He’s not sure if he’ll release it.) One of the fans is an aspiring rapper; naturally, the two made a song together.

Yachty wants to keep working with artists and producers outside of hip-hop, mentioning the Yeah Yeah Yeahs and even sharing his dream of writing a ballad for Elton John. (“I know I could write him a beautiful song.”) With South Korean music company HYBE’s recent purchase of Quality Control — a $300 million deal — Yachty’s realm of possibility is bigger than ever.

But he’s not ruling out his genre roots. Arguably, Let’s Start Here was made for the peers and heroes he played it for first — and was inspired by hip-hop’s chameleons. “I would love to do a project with Tyler [The Creator],” says Yachty. “He’s the reason I made this album. He’s the one who told me to do it, just go for it. He’s so confident and I have so much respect for him because he takes me seriously, and he always has.”

Penske Media Corp. is the largest shareholder of SXSW ; its brands are official media partners of SXSW.

This story originally appeared in the March 11, 2023, issue of Billboard.

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With his debut mixtape, ‘Lil Boat,’ Lil Yachty fully shed the mumble rap label, transitioning from SoundCloud sensation to major label star.

Published on

Lil Yachty’s debut mixtape, Lil Boat , is one of the pre-eminent releases of the SoundCloud era. Released on March 9, 2016, it made Lil Yachty a star, spawned multiple hits, and further legitimized the DIY-style rap that emerged at the beginning of the decade.

The Atlanta MC entered the crowded rapper-singer fray with a work that’s split into two distinct sides, seeing him grapple with dueling elements of his personality and career. The first half of Lil Boat sees Yachty flex his flow, while the second half finds him crooning in AutoTune. That may be a slightly reductive way to look at the collection (in reality, he does both throughout), but there’s certainly a kind of TI vs TIP split-personality concept to the whole affair. Yachty uses his style to demarcate who is who, and, despite his glee throughout, Lil Boat is a surprisingly subtle work for the chaotic time it represents.

Listen to the best of Lil Yachty on Apple Music and Spotify.

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‘hot, cool & vicious’: salt-n-pepa’s platinum debut album, a standout work.

Yachty’s debut mixtape is a standout work for the usual reasons – great name, great cover, and two singles that will forever be associated with Yachty and the era from which he emerged: “One Night” and “Minnesota.”

As a title, Lil Boat was perfect. Serving two purposes at once, it created a fitting alt.moniker for the MC while helping a lot of people to pronounce his name (did you actually say it like “yacht”?). Nautical luxury isn’t the most commonly-evoked lifestyle in hip-hop (outside of Puffy), so that theme alone was enough to put Yachty in his own lane. And then there’s the artwork: not a yacht, barely even a boat; it’s basically a little wooden dinghy. Beautifully composed, the image looks like a classical painting, bordered in a red that matches Yachty’s hair. It’s almost Americana in tone – though Yachty’s music is anything but.

All hail “King Of The Youth”

Yachty may be poised and confident on that cover, but he’s also lost in the gloom at sea – an apt metaphor for the musical style he was leading. While not traditional in any sense, Yachty is honest with his emotions in a way that younger generations have always been, and Lil Boat found him attempting to navigate his way through the emotionally turbulent years of his late youth. Shortly after his breakout, Yachty would declare himself “King Of Teens” or, alternatively, “King Of The Youth.” This might have sounded ridiculous to adults who weren’t even sure how to pronounce his name, but those adults were no longer in charge. Lil Yachty was not part of some hip-hop assembly line; like other DIY pioneers before him, Yachty and his crew were making these songs at home, often in a matter of minutes.

Outside of the Vikings football team and Ice Cube ’s “What Can I Do?,” Minnesota doesn’t get name-checked very often in hip-hop. Simply naming a track after a state was seemingly in line with the aforementioned “half-Americana, half trolling” theme of Lil Boat – but, of course, the song isn’t actually about Minnesota. It’s more of a celebration of Lil Yachty’s arrival on the scene. The draw and significance of having both Quavo and Young Thug on a song in 2016 is hard to overstate, and their guest appearances turned “Minnesota” into a certified-gold hit. At the time, Quavo was just months away from releasing “Bad And Boujee,” while Thug was fresh off Barter 6 and in the middle of his Slime Season run. Together, he and Yachty appeared at Kanye West’s Yeezy Season 3 fashion show, on February 11, where The Life Of Pablo received its public unveiling. Just two days after releasing his debut mixtape, Yachty was at the epicenter of one of hip-hop’s biggest cultural shifts.

Unprecedented moves

Lil Boat was big enough that Burberry Perry – Yachty’s right-hand man at the time and the producer behind most of the mixtape – came under pressure from the fashion label Burberry and was forced to change his name. That wasn’t exactly an unprecedented move, but the speed with which it happened certainly was. It’s not often that an internationally renowned fashion house serves a cease-and-desist to a kid who got famous on the internet and was barely old enough to vote.

Perry’s production on Lil Boat ’s lead single, “One Night’ (Yachty’s best-known song to date), guided the way for the rest of the collection. Even the beats he didn’t produce fall right in line, all cascading bells, and whistles alongside keys that let you hear Yachty’s grin throughout.

Lil Yachty’s emergence closely resembles that of the Odd Future collective, who, years earlier, more or less launched DIY rap on the internet (depending on how you view Lil B’s rise to fame). Seemingly overnight, Yachty was partnering with Urban Outfitters and the aptly titled Nautica clothing brand. His rapid ascent would have sounded like fan fiction just a few years earlier but, after his breakout, many artists began following his path to fame on a regular basis.

Having hit it big in such a short space of time, Yachty wasn’t about to slow down. He went on to guest (and absolutely steal the show) on “Broccoli,” a DRAM song with a Yachty-perfect beat. As one of the stars in Quality Control ’s shining roster, Yachty was operating alongside some of the biggest acts in hip-hop. With Lil Boat, he fully shed the “mumble rap” label, completing the transition from SoundCloud sensation to major label star.

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Maybe We Know a Little Too Much About Lil Yachty

By Andre Gee

Last year, I spoke with Lil Yachty about mystique. Our conversation about his Let’s Start Here album got awkward when he told me he didn’t want to reveal too much about its creation. I asked him about plans to release a documentary he recorded about the project, and he told me, “I doubt I’ll drop it. Just like me not wanting to do any of these interviews. I don’t really care to talk about it, [because] you give it all away [when] you pull the curtain back.”

When I asked him if he put a premium on artists with an allure of mystery when he was younger, he told me, “Coming up, you didn’t have all this social media. Even if [they] did an interview, you didn’t get every element of something. It’s the simple things you knew, but they left a lot of room for ‘Wow, how did he make this?’… Which is the beauty in art.” 

“I think Chapter One of my career is extremely oversaturated,” he told me. “I was thinking … I’m easily accessible. I’m on TikTok. I’m on YouTube. I’m on Twitter. I’m just everywhere. I didn’t like that.” But 18 months after our conversation, it feels like Yachty’s would-be triumphant next chapter is being marred by the same overexposure. 

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Yachty’s rap career is defined by a collage of viral moments. His first single, 2015’s “One Night,” went viral on SoundCloud. He came into public consciousness during the 2016 live stream of Yeezy Season 3. His “Minnesota” hit was the score to the hip-hop generational war being waged on rap Twitter, with his ignorance of Biggie and 2Pac’s catalog not helping things. And his Everyday Struggle admission that he didn’t know the full details of his QC contract made him fodder for anyone seeking to soapbox about naive rappers signing bad deals. Yachty saw all of the criticism, and he pushed back, arguably losing the musical charm that made him a distinct artist by trying to prove he could rap. He told me, that during that period, “I was trying to be the spokesman for the new generation because no one else wanted to talk. I felt, ‘I’m going to stand up. I’m going to speak.’”

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But it never stays strictly about the music with Yachty. During a Let’s Start Here listening event, he told the crowd he “wanted to be taken seriously as an artist and not just a SoundCloud rapper, not just a mumble rapper, not just a guy that made one hit.” Some people felt his comments implied that being “just” a rapper was inferior, but he told me that was “absolutely not” what he was trying to say. Regardless of his clarification, the perception of elitism stuck, and was intensified when he surmised that “hip-hop is in a terrible place” during our November 2023 Musicians on Musicians l ive event . 

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During an emotionally charged Instagram Live session, he claimed that he wrote all of Karrahbooo’s music and threw the remaining Concrete Boys under the bus by claiming he dressed all of them. He and Karrahbooo have since been taking to their stories to clap back at each other, making a bad situation worse. Yachty’s currently being lambasted as the kind of person who can’t wait to tell the world what they did for you — you never wanna be that guy. 

Perhaps people are letting the jokes fly for the moment, and Yachty dropping the right song will shift all the attention away from his mic miscues. Maybe Yachty doesn’t care what the public thinks. But it’s interesting to watch someone who’s repeatedly referenced not wanting to be accessible, and wishing he hadn’t opened his mouth, seemingly be unable to help himself from speaking out — in frequently self-sabotaging ways. It feels like the same digital soil that fertilized Yachty’s career is also his quicksand.

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How Lil Yachty Landed A Big Fortune With His $8 Million Net Worth

I f you’ve been tuned into the landscape of rap music for the last decade or so, you’re no doubt familiar with the work of Lil Yachty. T he Grammy nominated Georgia rapper is responsible for releasing such hits as “Yacht Club,” “Oprah’s Bank Account,” “Pardon Me.” Most recently, his hit “Poland” met with viral success. Since first emerging on the scene in 2015, the rising star has made a name for himself. He’s regarded for his unique image, positive message, and subversive musical range. The rapper’s latest full-length solo album Let’s Start Here completely reinvented his sound for a new audience. Today, Lil Yachty has a net worth of over $8 million according to Celebrity Net Worth . However, comments from the artist himself seem to suggest his actual nest egg is worth significantly more.

There’s no way to be 100 percent certain about the overall value of Lil Yachty’s investments. That said, it’s clear that the rapper has elevated himself from humble beginnings to generational wealth in a very brief span of time. This makes him an inspiration to other up-and-coming entertainers everywhere. So, now seems like as good a time as any to examine Yachty’s financial portfolio. Here, we’ll pour over his investment strategies, and see what we can learn about his blueprint for generating millions in net worth. Let’s dive directly into Yachty’s career earnings, gathered mostly through music sales, global tours, and endorsement deals with massive brands.

Early Life and Career Beginnings

Long before Lil Yachty was rocking stages worldwide, he was born Miles McCollum to a modest family in Mableton, Georgia. Throughout his youth, Yachty maintained a passion for crafting beats and rhymes. He found himself influenced by a number of emerging sounds from the Midwest to his hometown of Atlanta.

Eventually, Yachty committed himself fully to his craft, and dropped out of Alabama State University in 2015. While looking for an outlet to launch his music career, the young artist moved to New York on a whim. For a time, he crashed with a friend while networking with other artists online. During this period, the aspiring rapper supported himself by doing minimum wage work at fast food restaurants like McDonald’s. Despite bolstering a sizable following on Instagram, it wasn’t until his track “One Night” found its way into a viral video that Yachty finally blew up.

From there, Lil Yachty had a meteoric rise. Appearing front-and-center as a model during Kanye West’s 2016 Yeezy fashion show in Madison Square Garden helped with that. According to an interview with The Fader, Yachty was originally supposed to be tucked away in the back of the event. He inquired about his placement to the event director, explaining that his vibrant red hair perfectly matched the Aesthetic of Kanye’s latest colorways.

Per his interview, Yachty explained, “They switched it around and like bam, they put me in the front. That opened doors for me. A lot of fashion doors opened up after that.” Years later, Yachty revealed via social media that he had moved back into his mother’s home at the time. The artist explained that he was literally down to his last $70 during the Yeezy show. Clearly, his ascension to millionaire status came fast, and saved him from the throes of poverty.

Lil Yachty’s Music Career

Just one month after appearing in the Yeezy fashion show, Lil Yachty released his debut mixtape, Lil Boat . Lil Boat helped put him on the map for many listeners of the SoundCloud era . Later in 2016, the rising star would see his first Billboard charting hit, with the DRAM collaboration “Broccoli.” The track remains one of Yachty’s biggest singles to date. The rapper quickly found further success after signing to Quality Control Music and joining the likes of Denzel Curry, 21 Savage, Lil Uzi Vert, and more on the 2016 XXL Freshman cover. Today, fans regard the 2016 class as one of the best XXL Freshman lineups of all time. Their YouTube cypher performance touts a staggering view count of over 224 million at the time of this writing.

Since hard-launching his music career in 2015, Lil Yachty has delivered 5 full-length solo studio albums and 3 mixtapes. Most recently, he hopped on a collaborative album with English singer-songwriter and record producer James Blake. Yachty maintains a dedicated following of more than 17.5 million monthly listeners on Spotify alone. Not only that, but he serves as the frontman for a hip hop collective known as the Concrete Boys. There’s no way to directly calculate what percentage of Yachty’s wealth comes through music streaming. That said, the rapper claims that his true net worth is significantly higher than the reported figure of $8 million. Per a July 2024 report in Complex , Yachty stated, “I made 8 million in my first 8 months of rappin in 2016 on god… Y’all be letting this internet guide y’all. In real life s*** is different I’m telling you.”

Brand Deals and Other Ventures

While Lil Yachty’s biggest financial successes obviously stem from his streaming and tour revenue, the artist has also managed to bring in plenty of cash from lucrative brand deals and collaborations with other entertainers. The rapper famously appeared alongside NBA legend LeBron James in a 2017 promotional campaign for Sprite. The campaign saw Yachty sitting at a piano inside an ice cavern, and performing a parody of his own hit song, with lyrics that encouraged consumers to purchase the soft drink. Also in 2017, Yachty announced partnerships with clothing brands such as Nautica and Urban Outfitters, which saw him acting as the face of the brands for the entire Spring season. Since then, Lil Yachty has collaborated with massive brands which include Target, Fortnite, and McDonald’s.

The rising business magnate has also utilized his star-power for a number of crossover deals in the world of entertainment, including a few film and television placements. In 2020, Lil Yachty provided a new and improved rendition of the Saved by the Bell theme song. The new twist on the tune was used for the television revival series of the same name. Likewise, he crafted an original theme tune for Chef Boyardee to use in their ad campaigns. What’s more, he featured on the 25th anniversary soundtrack album for the Pokémon franchise.

In front of the camera, Yachty has appeared in several episodes of the hit ABC sitcom Grown-ish, including a few highly rated episodes in the final season, which aired in April 2024. Lil Yachty is also expected to star in an upcoming film loosely based on the card game Uno, as well as an upcoming TV series named Public Figures .

Obviously, Lil Yachty still has plenty of new and exciting projects in the works. There’s no telling what’s next for this Atlanta-bred superstar.

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Lil Yachty and Karrahbooo’s Feud Escalates With Bullying Accusations

Lil Yachty and his former artist Karrahbooo 's feud escalates with bullying accusations.

Lil Yachty and Karrahbooo Continue Throwing Shots at Each Other

On Sunday (Aug. 25), Lil Yachty hopped on his Instagram Story to address Karrahbooo's claims about writing her own rhymes and being bullied. Karrahbooo was part of Yachty's Concrete Boys collective. Although Yachty didn't directly address the 27-year-old rhymer, his message suggested that he clapped back at her allegations.

"Don't throw rocks and hide your hands," Boat wrote on his IG Story post below.

After catching wind of the Atlanta rapper's message, Karrahbooo posted a lengthy statement on her Instagram Story about supporting others in times of need and alluded to Yachty picking on her.

"I'll never forget this feeling, this chapter of my life. I'll never be the same," Karrahbooo penned in her IG Story. "I'll never forget who was there for me. I done chopped people out/spent my last/slapped folks 4 ni**as. I ride every time naturally, but that's just how I am. Nobody owe me sh*t tbh I'm just taking a mental note. I can't even look at most people da same way. To know the truth and watch a grown man with 12 million followers overly lie on my name and publicly bully me for literally no reason at all while I silently been conquering all da sh*t ni**as been throwing me this whole time behind closed doors. I'll never ignore the signs again, and I will never stop, no matter how much they hate me."

In her next IG Story post, Karrahbooo responded to Yachty's aforementioned message, insisting that they could discuss their issues on the phone. She also stated that she just wanted to make peace with individuals in the music scene.

"I never threw rocks and u have my number you big grown b**ch. Leave me alone literally @lilyachty," she typed in her IG Story post. "I never said nothing about sh*t and I still ain't say nothing 'bout what's really going on. I don't want no beef wit you industry people. Just move on wit ur life. Stop tryna bring me down when I stay out the way. I'm done talking. You got it. Yo character gone speak for itself."

Read More: Lil Yachty Goes Off After Being Accused of Mistreating Best Friend and Cohost Mitch During Podcast Episode

Why are lil yachty and karrahbooo beefing.

Things went south between Lil Yachty and Karrahbooo after a fan shared a post on social media and claimed that after bumping into Karrahbooo at a restaurant, the rapper told her she was kicked out of Concrete Boys and bullied during her time on the label . On Aug. 22, Lil Yachty went live on Instagram and denied Karrahbooo's bullying allegations . Boat said Karrahbooo was actually the one bullying others.

"Tell people how you talk to people," Yachty said in his heated video below. "How you tell my security guard, 'Oh, you homeless. You work for me. You're poor. We above you.' You talk to people like they nothing...Tell people how you verbally abuse people. How you said you gon' spit on me when you see me."

"I been letting you do this whole thing where you act like you a princess and you sweet," he continued. "Stop the front, bro. We have withheld your actions since the beginning of me giving you this career. What the f**k are we talking about, bro. You don't even do nothing. It's so crazy to me, bro. ’Cause I've given you a career, and from time to time, you just disrespect me.

Boat then mentioned that Karrahbooo has a $900,000 debt to his label. Afterward, the Quality Control rhymer leaked his reference track to Karrahbooo's 2023 On The Radar Freestyle , suggesting that she didn't pen the lyrics.

Karrahbooo Claps Back at Lil Yachty's Claims About Writing Her Lyrics

On Aug. 23, Karrahbooo went on her Instagram Story to clap back at Yachty by sharing three songs she claimed to write and highlighted their streaming counts.

"Running Late," boasted over 7 million streams, "Where Yo Daddy," garnered 3 million streams and the On the Radar Concrete Cypher freestyle hit nearly 3 million streams.

Karrahbooo captioned the image, "put it on yo kid i ain't these songs [M]iles[.] Stop da cap and leave me out ur internet shenanigans [tears of joy emoji]."

She continued: "Stop bullying me big dawg [tears of joy emoji] i never said nothing u letting random fans get in yo head man up."

During her performance at the Dig in Day Festival in Chicago on Aug. 24, Karrahbooo suggested that Yachty's ghostwriting claims were false.

"Who ain't write it, who ain't write it," she rapped during her performance in the video below.

Read More: Lil Yachty Says He’s Done With the Internet and Won’t Be Talking Anymore

Take a look at Lil Yachty and Karrahbooo shading each other online below.

See Lil Yachty and Karrahbooo’s Feud Escalate With Bullying Accusations

Watch lil yachty speak about karrahbooo's bullying allegations, see karahbooo address lil yachty's claims about writing her rhymes, see unnecessary hip-hop beefs that never should've happened, more from xxl.

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Karrahbooo Hits Back At Lil Yachty's Ghostwriting Claim: 'Stop Bullying Me'

Karrahbooo has responded to Lil Yachty ‘s fiery rant in which he claimed that he wrote all of her raps.

The Atlanta rapper, who recently departed Yachty’s Concrete Boys collective, took to her Instagram Stories early on Saturday (August 24) to address Lil Boat’s accusation.

“[P]ut it on yo kid i ain’t write these songs miles,” she wrote, addressing Yachty by his government name while referencing the child he welcomed in 2021 . “[S]top da cap and leave me out ur internet shenanigans [crying face emoji].”

She added: “[S]top bullying me big dawg [crying face emoji] i never said nothing u letting random fans get in yo head man up.”

Karrahbooo also posted a screenshot of her most popular songs on Apple Music and their respective streams, showing her solo track “Running Late” outperforming her contributions to Concrete Boys’ recently released compilation It’s Us Vol. 1 .

Earlier this week, Lil Yachty unloaded on Karrahbooo on Instagram Live  after she allegedly claimed that she was “bullied” by Concrete Boys and ultimately kicked out out of the group.

He made a number of accusations about his former assistant turned artist, including that she was “verbally abusive” towards his bodyguard and that he wrote all of her raps, including her  viral  On the Radar  freestyle .

“I’m so sick and tired of helping people,” he said. “Gon’ ‘head and tell people how you verbally abuse people. How you told my security guard, ‘Oh, you work for me. You’re poor and we above you.’ You talk to people like you nothing! [Tell people] how you told me you gonna spin on me when you see me. Your brain is clinically imbalanced.”

Yachty also denied mistreating the 27-year-old rapper: “Karrah, I have never bullied you. I let you live at my house for free! I ain’t never done nothing but be nice, love you, brought you around every rapper. I brought you around everybody from [Lil] Baby to Drake.”

He added: “You don’t even do nothing! I wrote every fucking verse you’ve done. I dressed you. I gave you that chrome Rolex. You were waiting tables! I changed your muthafucking life! And you on here lying talking about some ‘we bully you’? That shit got me fucked up, bruh!

“I wrote that fucking verse when we went on  On the Radar . I put you last on purpose so everyone would say, ‘Who the fuck is that girl?’ … I got the fucking reference.”

Backing up his claim, Yachty shared an iPhone voice note of his reference for Karrahbooo’s show-stealing verse in the Concrete Boys cypher.

Lil Yachty also denied stealing money from Karrahbooo and in turn accused her of owing almost $1 million to his label, which is apparently how much has been invested into her career.

“You talked to my fucking label crazy. You claim I was stealing money from you. Stealing money from you how, n-gga? You ain’t made no money!” he said.

“You $900,000 in the whole and I got every fucking receipt, n-gga. And I’ma post it. I dare you [to] try me. And I’ll post how much money your fucking streams have made.”

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August 21, 2024

He added: “Don’t go on the internet and act like I’m bullying you, bro. I’ve been nothing but loving and caring and paid your bills and gave you money and took you around the world. Nobody would even know who the fuck Karrahbooo was if it wasn’t for me.”

Yachty’s outburst was seemingly sparked by a social media post claiming that Karrahbooo had been bullied out of the Concrete Boys.

A restaurant employee claimed on X (formerly Twitter) to have been told by Karrah herself that she had been “kicked out” of the collective and that the group members were “bullying her a lot.”

Karrahbooo later made a vague reference to the drama on her own X account, quote tweeting her own post which said: “ion say too much cuz I know shit gone unfold on its own,” with the comment: “this aged well.”

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Karrahbooo Claps Back At Lil Yachty Following His Viral Tirade

The relationship between Lil Yachty and Karrahbooo is over, after the former went absolutely nuclear on Instagram Live. Lil Boat usually doesn't get too explosive on social media often. However, the Karrahbooo fan who disclosed that she was bullied out of the group obviously had him feeling some type of way. So, he promptly took to social media to leave Karrahbooo's entrails all over the internet . Yachty called out her character and even went as far as to claim that he "dressed" her, writing almost all of her songs/verses.

""Bro, go ahead [and tell] people how you talk to people... You talk to people like they were nothing. Like they're small, like they're beneath you". He took it even further, giving allegedly real interactions. "How you told me you 'gon spit on me when you see me. Your brain is clinically imbalanced". Then, a little later, he went for the killshot. "I've given you a career and time and time you just disrespect me. "I wrote every f***ing verse you've done, I dressed you... I been letting you do this whole thing where you act like you a princess". Yachty then concluded with, "Ichanged your motherf***ing life. You out here lying".

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Fans Feel That Karrahbooo Proved Lil Yachty's Point

Now, about a day or so later, Karrahbooo is standing up for herself. She issued her response on an IG Story in attempt to disprove Yachty's bold songwriting assertion. "Put it on yo kid I ain't write these songs Miles (Lil Yachty's government first name) - __ - stop da cap and leave me out ur internet shenanigans 😂". She then showed two songs that she claims to have penned on her own, "Running Late" and "WHERE YO DADDY?". She then finished off the post with, "Stop bullying me big dawg 😂 I never said nothing u letting random fans get in yo head man up". She might be feeling she did something, but all fans can do is laugh at what they see as a feeble clap back.

"So her response is... "HA, I wrote 2 songs!" 😂", one user replies. "Bruuuuuh she steadying saying this man bullying her by calling out facts. Yall don’t see she clearly the problem?", another adds. Regardless of where you stand, the ball is now in Yachty's court. What are your thoughts on Karrahbooo's response to Lil Yachty's recent claims on Instagram Live? Do you think she did enough to disprove her former label head's statements, why or why not? Do you foresee Lil Boat issuing a response? What do you think led him to lash out against her and Mitch? We would like to hear what you have to say, so leave your thoughts in the comments. Additionally, always keep it locked in with  HNHH  for all of the latest news surrounding Karrahbooo and Lil Yachty. Finally, stay with us for everything else going on in the music world.

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