The digital revolution in music has made the future of album cover art somewhat uncertain. Some say this art form will gradually disappear or at least be relegated to a secondary role, losing all of its importance as an integral part of the whole music experience. But what is certain is that during the decades when the album covers still were tangible, the visual art that accompanied the music has been a fundamental element which has served as a visible representation of the albums acoustic content. The covers have also functioned as a type of calling card for musicians, and the bands – especially the most transgressor ones – have always known how to use this resource to grab public’s and media’s attention, to shock… or simply just to warn everyone about the music the cover holds.

The list of the censured album covers is endless, but for now we’ll concentrate exclusively on the most sinister ones. The Beatles were the first to provoke their fans with a harsh photography – which by the way is kind of hard to understand if you keep in mind that the album contained all those sweet and lovely Let It Be-like songs. Well, since The Beatles a lot of blood and barbarity has accompanied albums of every possible musical genre out there, although, as you’ll soon see, there’s no doubt that Metal is the one with a clearest tendency to create sometimes terribly twisted cover art.

It’s by no means difficult to find extreme album covers, but if what you’re looking for is singularity, it becomes a lot more complicated. The criteria we used for the following ranking was based on the cover’s originality and historic and artistic value. It’s been done with heart and soul, after long debate and numerous, hot-headed conversations. To gather information our primary resource has been the internet along with some specialized magazines, but we also had some valuable help from some competent experts – like our friend Razor, a true connoisseur of Metal culture, who we would like to give a big shout out to here. A special thanks goes also to Malou, Patxi and Kiwi for helping with the translation.

13. The Beatles: Yesterday and today, 1966

This Beatles album, also known as the “Butcher” album, came out just shortly after John Lennon claimed the band was bigger than Jesus. This controversial statement had already sparked a firestorm of reaction in the United States, and the release of Yesterday And Today made the angry conservative moralists even angrier.

The cover shows the four mop heads wearing butcher’s smocks bloodied by cuts of raw beef and heads of dismembered dolls. The album was pulled from distribution the very day it was released, which of course made it a prized rarity for collectors.

Although the cover’s impact has without a doubt lost some of its original impact in the course of time, we think it deserves to be number 13 on our list for being such an important precursor. The fact that Beatles chose to make an album cover this macabre is still confusing – just look at the face of George Harrison if you disagree.

12. Scorpions: Virgin Killer, 1977

The German edition of Scorpions’ Virgin Killer features a naked twelve-year-old girl in a very suggestive pose. Her genitals are barely covered by a glass fragment, which makes quite a clear allusion to her lost virginity. The sleeve was considered to be child pornography and was substituted with a vulgar photo of the band.

11. Slayer: God hate us all, 2001

We couldn’t have left out of our extreme list the group that has been so consistently condemned, particularly in the form of censure, by the conservative forces in American society. We are talking about Slayer of course, the leader of the American thrash metal movement, who already generated criticism, boycotts and lawsuits in the ‘80s with the cover art of Reign in Blood and South of Heaven. It seems that with their 2001 release God hates us all, the band decided to get back to the good ol’ satanic aesthetics: the sleeve depicts a bloody Bible with an upside-down pentagram spiked with nails in it. As it can be expected, WalMart and many other retail outlets didn’t quite like the cover’s spirit, and anticipating trouble a ‘cover of the cover’ was made to disguise the actual artwork we are showing here.

While we’re talking about Slayer and covers, a detail on the sleeve of Christ Illusion made us wonder if Mother Teresa has never before been seen in such a macabre situation…

10. Burzum: Aske, 1995

The grindcore groups’ twisted competition about who had the most grotesque and impressive album cover got more and more deadly serious with the influence of the gore genre in movies. This religion-like tendency started with Reek of Putrefaction from Carcass – number two on our list – and took a radical turn in 1993 with the EP Aske from the Norwegian Black Metal group Burzum. The sleeve, which makes a clear declaration of intentions, features the ruins of “Fantoftkirke”, a church burnt down by the band’s lead singer in 1992. It wasn’t the first torched church, nor the last: during the next four years, 22 churches, some of them medieval, were burnt to the ground in Norway.

9. Pabellón Psiquiátrico: La primera en la frente, 1987

This spine-chilling album cover comes from Spanish group Pabellón Psiquiátrico (Psychiatric Pavilion). The guy with the machine-gun in his mouth is the lead singer Juan Antonio “Patuchas” Canta, who was known for his surrealistic lyrics like the one of the popular summer hit “La Danza de los 40 Limones” (Dance of the 40 Lemons). That hot summer of 1987 few could predict the sad destiny of the album cover’s protagonist. “Patuchas” committed suicide nine years later at the age of 30.

8. Exhumed: Exhumed, 1998

Welcome to the Exhumed’s flesh feast! In this cover the gore-obsessed band has used all necessary means to create a maximum splatter experience to accompany the listening of the album. Although the cover’s scene is not real, the bizarre artwork, with the bloody chainsaw close-up and the head in the microwave, makes it worthy of mentioning. All in all, it is a true delicacy for lovers of Ruggero Deodato’s Cannibal Holocaust.

7. Pungent Stench: Been Caught Buttering, 1991

It took two long years of Kafkaesque bureaucratic procedures for an American photographer Joel-Peter Witkin to obtain a permission for a one-day photo-shoot in a morgue in México City. The result can be seen in this Pungent Stench album cover from the year 1991. Of all the body parts Witkin saw that day, he was especially interested in a bisected head. The photographer set up the tripod and loaded the camera with film, but he couldn’t really figure out how to create the composition he was looking for. After spending a day thinking of that severed head, he finally came to the conclusion that sometimes the two-piece puzzles are the most difficult ones. That simple conclusion made him create one of his most famous work, The Kiss.

6. Cannibal Corpse: Butchered at Birth, 1991

It is mentioned in the highly recommended documentary “Metal: A Headbanger’s Journey”, that almost every single one of the Cannibal Corpse’s covers have been censured. The covers’ illustrations are known for their peculiar, unique style loved by band’s fans. As the lead singer George“Corpsegrinder” Fisher puts it: “it’s art, just look at it as art. Yeah, it’s disgusting…but go to the Vatican and look at some of the art there. That’s real, that’s representing something that’s real, that could happen. This [artwork], you know, that’s never going to happen…”

It wasn’t an easy task to choose which Cannibal Corpse cover should we honour on our Top 13 list. Tomb of the Mutilated was a great contender, but it was Butchered at Birth that finally made it. The truth is that all of the covers would have fitted perfectly in this macabre position. If you want to take a closer look at these censured covers, you should definitely check the excellent Cannibal Corpse monograph at Sleevage.

5. Christian Death: Sex, Drugs and Jesus Christ, 1988

The most recent polemic Christian Death’s album cover was the one of the Pornographic Messiah, which featured Christ having wild doggy style sex. However, the band’s first – and by so far the most plain-spoken – iconoclastic attack against Jesus Christ’s figure was made back in 1988 when the album Sex, Drugs and Jesus Christ came out. The cover shows an explicit photograph of Christ shooting heroin while piously looking up towards the sky. We suppose it goes without saying that the cover was immediately censured in United States and substituted with a far more softer one. Without the participation of Rozz Williams, Valor Kand and Gitane Demone launched with this godless cover what was about to be one of their best albums.

4. Cripple Bastards: Almost Human, 1999

Cripple Bastards’ grind core isn’t maybe the most remarkable in the extreme music fiend. However there’s one thing that has grabbed as well the critics’ as the specialized audience’s attention ever since their debut in 1999, and that is the album cover featured above. The highly controversial sleeve features a violent blowjob scene taken from a pornographic gore flick ”Forced Entry”, today considered a cult classic among underground film cinephiles (check out the trailer here).

And why would someone choose to use a photo of a girl forced to a blowjob at gunpoint as an album cover? The band explains that there’s a clear the relation between the title and the blowjob pic: “the basic idea was human insensitivity, the progressive decay of feelings and emotions in modern man’s ethics, in few words.. the loss of humanity of humans in the contemporary world (…) The title ‘Almost human’ gives a sense to that cover art. If someone reads the CB lyrics one by one they’ll certainly get a clear idea of what it’s all about and will certainly figure out that the cover of our CD is obviously NOT meant to inspire rape, sexual control or sexism of any form. (…) The “Almost human” CD is all about giving a portrait of human degradation, insensibility, feelings and naturalness being castrated by a hallucinating reality of abuse, indifference, resignation”.

3. Brujería: Matando Güeros, 1993

The Mexican death-grind band Brujería (a Spanish word meaning “witchcraft”) decided to illustrate their first long play with this photo taken from Mexican newspaper Alarma, although there are also rumours that the head on the photo belonged to a victim of the band’s satanic sacrifices. They gave an indication on what was to come with the cover of the single Machetazos, but it is definitely the cover of Matando Güeros they will be remembered for. Evidently it was banned – by covering the photo with a black paper board – but word had already gotten around and many bought the album just because they were probably dying to know if the music was as brutal as the cover.

2. Carcass: Reek of Putrefaction, 1988

The debut album of English Death Metal group Carcass has without a doubt one of the most repulsive covers ever made. It was the band’s record label Earache which encouraged them to make a cover as intense as possible, and that’s why it is somewhat strange that the CD version was later illustrated with a lot less controversial artwork. The design was made by an agency called Gruesome Graphics, behind which was the group’s vocalist and bass player Jeff Walker, who also did the cover of Nappalm Death’s Scum. The sleeve’s collage consists of autopsy photos taken from medical journals. Although the details are deeply disgusting, they are carefully put together in order to construct a captivating collage. As Lasse Margaug describes in Wire Magazine (282/2007): “…it reaches the level of absurdism and deconstruction; placing it closer to the tradition of dada, Stan Brakhage, Hermann Nitsch and Damien Hirst than the usual teenage Metal sensationalism”. Knowing that Carcass were a vegan group with strong roots in the punk scene, you can also interpret the cover as a clear ‘meat is murder’ statement. Great cover, great album!

1. Mayhem: Dawn of the black hearts, 1991

The most macabre album cover in music history certainly deserves its number one position on our list – not so much for the obvious brutality of its photo as for the dreadful story behind it.

Dead, the vocalist of Norwegian black metal group Mayhem, killed himself with a shotgun and a knife. When the other band members found him dead at his home, they decided to take some photos of their late friend. Some rumours say they didn’t just do that, but was also bone pendants made from Dead’s skull.

The person most responsible for this dark photo session was the group’s guitarist, Euronymous. He was friends with Mauricio “Bull Metal” Montoya, the founding member of Columbian Death group Masacre and the owner of the record label Warmasters Records. It is said to have been his idea to use the photo of the late vocalist’s corpse as a sleeve of Dawn of the Black Hearts, a live bootleg which was originally limited to 300 copies but has later on been reissued countless of times.