24 Album Covers to Get You Ready For Spooky Season
To be honest, we’re not entirely certain this prog rock band meant for the cover to be as creepy as it is, but the blue tint of this third album (the same cover without the tint was used for their second album, Valentyne Suite), combine with an empty field, girl giving a vacant stare, and a strange monolith certainly check several boxes.
2. Rush - Permanent Waves
For those of you taking costume ideas from Fallout this year, Rush’s post-apocalyptic 50s-inspired cover for their album Permanent Waves may also strike your fancy
3. Agoraphobic Nosebleed - Altered States Of America/ANBRX II Delta 9
Notable Grindcore band Agoraphobic Nosebleed pulls no punches and releases a cover to match their genre with this absolutely disturbing colorscape of images worthy of any horror slasher movie
4. Berlin - Count Three And Pray
It’s the subtlety for us in this one. What looks like a very cute Cyndi Lauper-esque cover by the remarkable 80s Darkwave band makes you take a double-take when you realize — wait, what is that??
5. Fotomaker - Vis-á-Vis
Even though Fotomaker’s career as a band was short-lived, that didn’t stop them from releasing three albums in the year-long span that they held together. All of them feature unsettling faces such as this one.
6. Emerson, Lake & Palmer - Brain Salad Surgery
As far as spooky album covers go, you’re not gonna get much better than the masterful art of H.R. Giger. Although he occasionally stepped in to design album covers such as this one for supergroup Emerson, Lake & Palmer, he’s probably best known for his film design, especially the Alien movies.
7. Harry Nilsson - Son of Schmilsson
Not only does this Harry Nilsson album feature former Beatles Ringo Starr and George Harrison on a few tracks, there’s a cameo on this spooky album cover too: the haunting photograph was taken inside George Harrison’s home.
8. Disco Hits Explosion, Vol. I
Let’s be honest, it’s not truly Halloween unless you get just a little campy with it. This Japanese-origin compilation album goes for it all the way, down to tracks like Soul Dracula
9. Entombed - Left Hand Path
It should be no shock that metal bands kind of take the cake when it comes to creepy Halloween covers, but death metal stalwarts Entombed’s admirable sense of detail on their album covers puts them a cut above the rest
10. Jean Michel-Jarre - Equinoxe
Most refer to Jarre’s album Oxygene for spooky cover art, and while skulls are all well and good, we can’t get over the ghostly stares of this later album of his.
11. Morbid Angel - Covenant
Morbid Angel dives head-first into the occult with Covenant, largely considered one of the greatest death metal albums of all time.
12. Ghostbusters (Original Soundtrack Album)
We’ll be honest, this entry sparked a huge debate amongst us as to whether a logo (especially from, technically, a movie) should count as album art, but in the end we decided that it would be a huge error not to include it
13. Black Rose - Black Rose
This hard rock album was the only release for the group, although to be fair the lead singer had a lot of other things on her plate (it’s Cher). The cover art goes all out in an homage to Vampira, Morticia Addams, and other vamps of the time
14. The Michael Schenker Group - The Michael Schenker Group
Released in 1980, this album art depicts Michael Schenker himself being tested on in a lab, a rather spooky scene worthy of your nightmares. And if that’s not enough, you may recognize Schenker from his more-popular bands that he was a part of, featuring equally spooky names: UFO, and Scorpions.
15. Ministry - ΚΕΦΑΛΗΞΘ (Psalm 69)
Industrial band Ministry are no strangers to occult themes, and this album, inspired by a work of Aleister Crowley no less, kicks that up to 11
16. The Exploited - Horror Epics.
Well, punk rock has never been about subtlety and that is certainly the case with The Exploited’s Horror Epics.
17. Parliament - The Clones of Dr. Funkenstein
The outrageously Funkadelic style is par for the course on any Parliament album, but this one in particular gets extra-spooky with a take on Frankenstein. You’d have a hard time beating these costumer out at a Halloween party.
18. Pat Benatar - Get Nervous
Complete with a straitjacket and padded room, Pat Benatar proves that she would still be the most stylish person even in the insane asylum.
19. Peter Hope & Richard H. Kirk - Hoodoo Talk
Industrial music may be the biggest rival to metal when it comes to who can outdo each other in terms of creepy album art (sorry goths, you’re just a little too mopey to contend). Richard H. Kirk may be better known to some as one of the key figures in the band Cabaret Voltaire
20. Brutal Truth - End Time
The death metal genre strikes again with Brutal Truth’s End Time, a cover that intersects classic horror with the kind that hits a little close to home with secret society insignias
21. The Three Johns - Death Of The European
The Three Johns’ graffiti-esque album art puts a little levity into the hard scary truths that life may sometimes bring
22. Locust - Playgue
It wouldn’t be Halloween without acknowledging the lighter side of spookiness, and what better to do that than campy sci-fi? And if we were to take this little-known 70s band’s album and use it to define camp - “A giant silkworm laser-blasting the Illuminati symbol at the bottom of a cliff” - we wouldn’t be very far off the mark.
23. Seikima-II - The Devil Plays Heavy Metal (聖飢魔II – 悪魔が来たりてヘヴィメタる)
Leave it to the Japanese metal bands to fully commit: fronted by a man only known as Demon Kakka, Seikima-II claims to be a group of demons from another dimension, hoping to propagate Satan through their music.
24. Judas Priest - Hell Bent for Leather
Apparently the Brits such as Priest feel they have to go a little soft for the U.S.; they changed the album name on release in the States, as they felt the original Killing Machine’s “murderous implications” were too much. At least they kept the killer artwork.