8 of the most controversial album covers of all time

You’ve seen the title. You know where we’re going with this. In the last 48 hours, it’s been hard to miss the controversy surrounding the artwork for Serena Carpenter’s seventh studio album Man’s Best Friend. Featuring the Disney kid-turned-pop-superstar on her knees in front of a faceless man who is pulling her hair back, the album cover immediately prompted widespread debate when it dropped on Wednesday night (June 11).

While certainly not the most sexually explicit album artwork to have been released (more on that later), critics honed in on the timing of the imagery, given the background of far-right misogyny and backsliding towards traditional gender roles in certain corners of the internet in recent years. Still, others argued that policing women’s sexuality in this day and age is itself a step backwards, also pointing to the fact that Carpenter has regularly poked fun at men in her music and that the new project will likely continue this satirical streak. 

We’ll let the think pieces duke it out on this one (our editorial director, Dominique Sisley, has just written a good one), but the recent debate has also got us thinking – have we not been here before? Below, we look back at eight of the most controversial album covers of all time. 

Nirvana’s grunge opus is quite literally one of the best albums of all time. Nevermind immediately received rave reviews when it dropped in 1991 and has since soundtracked multiple generations of teenage angst, but the album’s cover has had a slightly more divisive history. It features a four-month-old fully nude baby named Spencer Elden submerged in water, apparently attempting to reach for a dollar bill on a fishing hook in front of him. 

In 2021, Elden, now in his thirties, attempted to sue Nirvana for violating US federal child pornography protections with the image, arguing that his genitalia should have been censored and that the image has resulted in “lifelong damages”. The lawsuit was initially dismissed by attorney Jamie White as “frivolous”, but Elden has continued to pursue the claim ever since. To some extent, this seems to be a classic case of the Barbara Streisand effect – Elden’s lawsuit drew far more attention to his identity as the Nevermind baby than had ever existed prior. (SPM)

2012 was peak Death Grips era. Their debut rap-rock mixtape, Exmilitary, turned heads globally when it was released in 2011, and was soon followed up with debut album The Money Store. So, all eyes were on the Californian experimental trio when they decided to intentionally leak their second LP, No Love, Deep Web online the following year. 

While The Money Store’s cover was already controversial, featuring a cartoon, cigarette-smoking dominatrix holding a bare-breasted gimp on leash, No Love, Deep Web took things to a whole new level, depicting an erect penis with the album title scrawled across its shaft. Death Grips quickly released a statement on their website reading: “US law states you must be 18 years of age to view graphic sexual material. We consider this art,” but, unsurprisingly, the artwork has since been censored on pretty much every available streaming platform anyway. (SPM)

The cover of Sticky Fingers, The Stones’ ninth album, is one of my all-time favourites. Designed by Andy Warhol, the artwork hones in on a man’s denim-clad crotch, dickprint arrestingly apparent. The original vinyl LP featured a working fly which unzipped to reveal a sliver of white briefs – today, ‘zippy’ editions of the record can fetch hundreds of pounds. “As a record-store attraction, the album is positively too dreadful to ignore […] Just in time, too, to keep rock from losing its evil leer for good,” a TIME magazine wrote at the time, in one particularly pearl-clutching review. In Spain, at the time under the rule of fascist General Franco, the cover was classed as obscene and banned – the record company had to change the sleeve to a picture of a woman’s fingers emerging from a can of treacle. (SS)

Genre-breaking rap metal band Rage Against the Machine never intended to play by the establishment’s rules – after all, it’s in their name. Their debut self-titled album depicted the infamous self-immolation of Vietnamese monk Thích Quảng Đức in 1963, protesting the persecution of Buddhists by South Vietnam’s US-backed and Catholic-majority government at the time. It was indeed a graphic image, but the cover was just one of many controversies that Rage Against the Machine’s explosive release attracted. Lead single “Killing in the Name”, an incendiary critique of police brutality in the wake of the beating of Rodney King in 1992, was widely censored in public broadcasts for its use of the word “fuck” 17 times. Still, the group refused to compromise.

While performing “Killing in the Name” at Woodstock ‘99, Rage Against the Machine frontman Zack de la Rocha burned a United States flag onstage. Later, in 2009, a BBC Radio 5 Live broadcast was suddenly cut when Rocha dived into the track’s expletive-filled chorus, ignoring previous requests to censor his lyrics. (SPM)

If you’re unfamiliar, Yesterday and Today was a Beatles album released exclusively in the US and Canada in 1966, featuring a selection of songs from Help!, Rubber Soul, and Revolver. Following the peak of Beatlemania, the group were keen to break away from their cookie-cutter image and experiment with their music and presentation. They enlisted British photographer Robert Whitaker to help them create a more avant-garde album cover for Yesterday and Today, and the result was a photograph of the group in white butcher’s coats, surrounded by raw meat and decapitated baby dolls – an image which Paul McCartney claimed was supposed to be a comment against the Vietnam War. Unsurprisingly, most retailers found the cover so shocking that they refused to stock the LP; in the end, all copies were recalled and the cover replaced with a tamer photograph. The cost of the operation for Capitol Records totalled $250,000, equivalent to $2.42 million in 2024. (SS)

While all the other album covers on this list were controversial for their political messaging or transgressive imagery, the original artwork for American pop singer Ava Max’s second studio album was considered offensive for just being… bad. Unveiled on X/Twitter in June 2022, Diamonds & Dancefloors’ initial cover depicted a close-up of Max’s face submerged in a bed of seemingly computer-generated diamonds, and her fans were not impressed. 

“ava hunni ily, but there’s still time to change the cover,” one user wrote – they were right. Released in January of the following year, Diamonds & Dancefloors appeared on streaming platforms with a much more well-received image of Max’s full body in a glitter negligé. Unfortunately, the album’s physical copies had already been pressed with the original offending artwork. Oops! (SPM)

Two Virgins is the first of three collaborative experimental albums created by John Lennon and Yoko Ono. The album cover, shot in October 1968 (while Lennon was still technically married to his first wife, Cynthia), captures the pair completely naked; while the front shows them frontally nude, the rear shows them nude from behind. The cover, which was Lennon’s idea, sparked outrage, and incensed distributors resorted to selling the album in a plain brown wrapper in order to conceal the nudity. In Lennon’s view, the outrage stemmed more from the fact that the couple weren’t conventionally attractive and, in his words, resembled “two slightly overweight ex-junkies”. (SS)

Gangsta rap pioneer Ice Cube was pissing off all the right people at the turn of the 90s. As a founding member of N.W.A, Cube had already experienced censorship when anthemic protest single “Fuck Tha Police” was banned from radio stations around the world for allegedly inciting violence, but Cube soon doubled-down on his views in solo albums AmeriKKA’s Most Wanted and Death Certificate. 

Both projects feature highly politicised lyrics, criticising police brutality and racial profiling in the United States and the cover for Death Certificate in particular sparked widespread outrage for its depiction of a corpse identified by a toe-tag as ‘Uncle Sam’. “Broke up the families forever, And to this day, Black folks can’t stick together… when I think about it, it make me say ‘Damn I wanna kill Sam’,” Cube raps on the project, and can you blame him? Over 30 years later, America is still plagued by institutional racism. (SPM)