Best Pink Floyd Album Covers: 20 Artworks Ranked And Reviewed

20: ‘A Collection Of Great Dance Songs’ (1981)

After The Wall became a global smash, Pink Floyd’s US label, Columbia, were keen to issue more product. However, when they discovered the band had nothing new in the can, they decided upon a “best of” collection, to be released in time for 1981’s Christmas holiday season. The title, A Collection Of Great Dance Songs, reportedly derived from drummer Nick Mason’s sardonic comment that their US label “probably thought we were a dance band”, so designers Hipgnosis (working under the pseudonym TCP) came up with a cover image depicting a pair of dancers held in place.

Though the band viewed it as a compromise, A Collection Of Great Dance Songs has since become a mandatory release. It’s generally viewed as the best point of entry for newcomers, while the specially re-recorded version of Money and a unique edit of Shine On You Crazy Diamond also ensure it’s an essential purchase for dedicated fans.

Photography: Aubrey Powell, Peter Christopherson (uncredited) | Design: TCP (Hipgnosis)

19: ‘Relics’ (1971)

First issued by EMI’s budget label, Starline, in 1971, to help maintain Pink Floyd’s profile while they grappled with that year’s Meddle, Relics was subtitled A Bizarre Collection Of Antiques And Curios. That captured the compilation’s spirit: while it was a seemingly random assortment of tracks, it included the band’s first two Syd Barrett-fronted hits, Arnold Layne and See Emily Play, along with then hard-to-source cuts such as Julia Dream, Paint Box and Careful With That Axe, Eugene, and the previously unreleased Biding My Time – all of which ensured the collection was a must-have for fans.

Fittingly, Relics came housed in a memorable sleeve depicting its very own “antique and curio”, with a black-and-white line drawing by Nick Mason depicting a wonderfully Heath Robinson-esque dream machine, conjured directly from Mason’s imagination. For the 1996 CD reissue, however, Hipgnosis’ Storm Thorgerson and Peter Curzon came up with the idea of a three-dimensional depiction of Mason’s original idea, and the real-life relic was duly constructed, mostly out of wood, by Jon Crossland and photographed by Tony May.

Illustration: Nick Mason (original artwork) | Photography: Tony May (CD reissue) | Design: Hipgnosis (Storm Thorgerson and Peter Curzon), Jon Crossland (CD reissue)

18: ‘The Later Years 1987-2019’ (2019)

Though a posthumously released collection, The Later Years nonetheless sports a sleeve more than worthy of its place alongside the best Pink Floyd album covers. Of its conception, Hipgnosis’ co-founder Aubrey Powell told The Browse Gallery: “The design for The Early Years had been very dry and a graphic based on the original Pink Floyd touring van of 1966, which was black with a diagonal white stripe.

“So I set about compiling a list of people I wanted to work with,” Powell continued. “At the top was Michael Johnson from the Johnson Banks studio. He came up with an interesting concept and, with some input from me, we decided on a young woman walking a desert road near Joshua Tree in California. As she passed the street lights at the side of the road, they would seem to curve in an unusual manner. It’s partly sci-fi and partly about power. The power to change the normal into the abnormal by a simple twist of fate. The power of Pink Floyd.”

Photography: Robert Truman | Design: Aubrey Powell, Peter Curzon, Michael Johnson

17: ‘More’ (1969)

Though recorded for the soundtrack to Barbet Schroeder’s 1969 film, More, the music Pink Floyd delivered for the Franco-Swiss filmmaker was robust enough to work as a standalone album. The movie told an ominous tale of heroin addiction set against the spectacular backdrop of the Balearic island of Ibiza, but while Pink Floyd’s music reflected the island’s unique golden light, the Hipgnosis-designed sleeve (depicting a film still of two characters playing around a windmill, processed in a dark room to make it appear like a psychedelic trip) also holds its own among the best Pink Floyd album covers.

Admittedly, it no doubt helped that the band and their design team had prior knowledge of the Balearics. Hipgnosis co-founder Aubrey Powell first visited the neighbouring island of Formentera with Dave Gilmour in 1968, and later returned with Syd Barrett. “The light was very influential for me in terms of what we did with Hipgnosis,” Powell later revealed in a Record Collector interview.

Design: Hipgnosis

16: ‘Pulse’ (1995)

Culled from performances on the European leg of Pink Floyd’s Division Bell tour of 1994, Pulse was a forward-looking album – both sonically and visually. The record was mixed in QSound (effectively a 3D audio effect, even on a two-channel stereo system), while its striking artwork – created by combining 36 separate photographs – came with a flashing red LED light on the side of the CD case. Though the brainchild of Hipgnosis’ Storm Thorgerson, EMI contractor Jon Kempner executed the actual design work, with the flashing pulse powered by a single AA battery. The battery life was stated to last over six months, though some versions of the sleeve were created requiring two AA batteries, before later CD editions omitted the blinking LED.

“Essentially, it’s a device which we thought was entertaining. It’s an idea of Storm Thorgerson’s, which related to Dark Side Of The Moon and the pulse,” Nick Mason said. “It’s a live album, so the box is ‘alive’. After that, in terms of seriously deep meanings, one might be struggling a bit.”

Photography: Robert Truman, Robert Llewellyn | Design: Hipgnosis (Storm Thorgerson, Peter Curzon), Jon Crossland, Finlay Cowan

15: ‘Obscured By Clouds’ (1972)

Pink Floyd’s soundtrack for 1969’s More led to high-profile work on Michelangelo Antonioni’s Zabriskie Point in 1970, and a further commission with Barbet Schroeder on 1972’s La Vallée: a film concerning the spiritual quest of a young woman (played by actress Bulle Ogier) in the jungle of New Guinea.

At the time the band accepted the commission, they were already preparing the material for their future classic The Dark Side Of The Moon, so the music they recorded for La Vallée (released in June 1972 as Obscured By Clouds) was laid down quickly at sessions in London and at France’s Château D’Hérouville early in 1972. By Pink Floyd’s expansive standards, the songs were relatively simple and direct, but they were as evocative as the record’s artwork was enigmatic. Again designed by Hipgnosis’ Storm Thorgerson and Aubrey Powell, the sleeve’s blurred image actually depicted a man sitting in a tree, but after the slide of the image jammed on a 35mm projector while the band were deciding which photo to use for the cover, everyone agreed the distorted image was perfect.

Design: Hipgnosis (Storm Thorgerson and Aubrey Powell)

14: ‘Meddle’ (1971)

With the benefit of hindsight, it’s perhaps as well Pink Floyd rejected Hipgnosis’ initial concept for the artwork to 1971’s Meddle, as the design team had suggested the band go with a close-up shot of a baboon’s anus. Thankfully, the group overruled them, instructing Powell and Thorgerson that they would prefer the image of “an ear underwater”, collecting waves of sound, which were represented by the ripples in the water in the finished sleeve. Though the Hipgnosis team were never happy with it, the evocative image remains a noteworthy entry among Pink Floyd album covers.

Photographer: Bob Dowling | Design: Hipgnosis (Storm Thorgerson and Aubrey Powell)

13: ‘A Saucerful Of Secrets’ (1968)

Pink Floyd’s second album, A Saucerful Of Secrets, was a pivotal release in more ways than one. It documented the band in the throes of transition, with Syd Barrett edging out of the picture and Dave Gilmour easing his way in, but it also marked the first of many occasions when Pink Floyd would collaborate with Hipgnosis.

For the A Saucerful Of Secrets artwork, the nascent designers superimposed 13 separate images on top of each other, with the collage featuring an image based on a panel from a 1967 Dr Strange comic book story, illustrated by Marie Severin. After EMI approved the cover, Hipgnosis’ business quickly expanded, with commissions from bands including The Pretty Things, Free and more allowing them to build a studio in London’s Denmark Street in 1970.

Design: Hipgnosis (Storm Thorgerson and Aubrey Powell)

12: ‘The Final Cut’ (1983)

1983’s bleak but moving The Final Cut was inspired by both the recent Falklands War and the horrors of war in general. For its artwork, Roger Waters chose to work with his brother-in-law, Vogue photographer Willie Christie, instead of either Hipgnosis or Gerald Scarfe, the latter of whom had designed The Final Cut’s predecessor, The Wall.

Bearing in mind the album’s contents, it’s fitting that Waters and Christie chose a Remembrance poppy and four World War II medals for The Final Cut’s stark sleeve. “We were talking about it all the time from conception,” Christie said in a contemporary interview. “Roger asked me to do the stills. They came out of ideas we had talked about – poppies featured a lot because of the theme of it. I did the stills and the strip of medals. The field [on the back cover] was near Henley. We needed a field of corn and I’d done a Vogue shoot down there in 1977. A prop company called Asylum made me up some poppies, as real poppies don’t last.”

Photography: Willie Christie | Design: Roger Waters, Artful Dodgers (Willie Christie)

11: ‘Ummagumma’ (1969)

The cover for Pink Floyd’s fourth album, Ummagumma, received considerable acclaim for Hipgnosis’ use of the “Droste Effect”, in which an image repeats within itself. The term came from a Dutch cocoa box which displayed the same effect on its front; in the pre-Photoshop days of the 70s, it was possible to achieve the effect using cameras and mirrors, as can be seen in Bruce Gowers’ famous promo video for Queen’s Bohemian Rhapsody.

For the Ummagumma artwork, Storm Thorgerson wanted to use Pink Floyd themselves in the frames, but also to rearrange each band member in each one. He shot the pictures at his girlfriend’s house in Shelford, Cambridge, and later noted: “Physically, it is like a window, metaphorically it’s an endless set of pictures, an endless set of layers, going back and back, regressing endlessly. The artwork was rather amateurishly executed, with Stanley knife and ruler, and suffered from my lack of control. The rotation of the group members is the icing on the cake.”

Photography: Storm Thorgerson | Design: Hipgnosis (Storm Thorgerson and Aubrey Powell)

10. ‘The Wall’ (1979)

Conceived by Roger Waters, Pink Floyd’s 11th studio album, The Wall, was a sprawling double-disc rock opera that explores the life of Pink, a jaded rock star whose eventual self-imposed isolation from society forms a figurative wall. Waters reputedly based Pink upon Syd Barrett, though with elements of his own life and character thrown in. The album’s themes of abandonment and isolation clearly struck a chord with the wider world, as it eventually moved over 30 million copies worldwide.

Instead of their regular Hipgnosis design team, Waters entrusted the design to satirical cartoonist/artist Gerald Scarfe, who had worked with the band on the Wish You Were Here tour. “It was Roger’s idea from the beginning that it should be a blank wall,” Scarfe revealed in an interview with Louder.

“It didn’t take long as it’s just a grid, really, but we tried it in various different ways, with dark black lines, soft grey lines, big bricks, small bricks. The writing on the front was just written by me, very quickly. We were actually worried about blemishing the purity of the cover, and almost wanted not to have a logo on the front. But the commercial decision was that nobody would know what the album was, so the logo was put on a separate piece of cellophane inside the shrink-wrap. Once you opened it, the logo fell off and you had a pure white album.”

Design: Gerald Scarfe

9: ‘The Endless River’ (2014)

Hipgnosis co-founder Storm Thorgerson passed away in 2013, so for Pink Floyd’s final studio album, The Endless River, his creative partner, Aubrey Powell, reached out to an 18-year-old Egyptian artist and Pink Floyd fan, Ahmed Emad Eldin, after he discovered the young artist’s portfolio on the online platform Behance.

Eldin’s original piece was titled Beyond The Sky and, as he later told Classic Rock, he created it “after thinking about the intersection of life, nature and what is beyond the world – what takes you to new limits”. Aubrey Powell felt the young artist’s concept had “an instant Floydian resonance”, and his evocative artwork – depicting a young man punting a Thames skiff across a sea of clouds towards the sun – immediately took its place in the upper echelons of the best Pink Floyd album covers.

Design: Ahmed Emad Eldin, Aubrey Powell, Stylorouge

8: ‘A Momentary Lapse Of Reason’ (1987)

Storm Thorgerson’s magnificently surreal sleeve design for 1987’s A Momentary Lapse Of Reason seems all the more heroic when you consider it was put together in real time without any CGI or Photoshop trickery.

Inspired by a lyric from one of the album’s key songs, Yet Another Movie (“The sun that burned a fiery red/The vision of an empty bed”), and Dave Gilmour’s suggestion that the sleeve might feature a bed in a Mediterranean house, along with something to represent “vestiges of relationships that have evaporated, leaving only echoes”, Thorgerson and his team assembled hundreds of hospital beds on Saunton Sands in North Devon in 1987: the same venue where some of the scenes for the 1982 movie Pink Floyd: The Wall were filmed. The hang glider in the sky, meanwhile, references another of the album’s songs, Learning To Fly. The photographer, Bob Dowling, won a gold award at the Association Of Photographers Awards for the painstakingly crafted image, which took approximately two weeks to complete.

Photography: Bob Dowling | Design: Storm Thorgerson (Hipgnosis)

7: ‘Atom Heart Mother’ (1970)

Hipgnosis hadn’t heard any of the music, read any of the songs’ lyrics or even been told the album title when they began preparing the artwork for Pink Floyd’s fifth album, Atom Heart Mother. In retrospect, it worked in their favour. The band gave Storm Thorgerson and Aubrey Powell carte blanche to do whatever they liked and, after some discussion with a surreal artist friend, John Blake, the duo decided that photographing a cow might be so unexpected and irrational that it might just work.

“Storm and I went to a field in North London and photographed a cow,” Powell told Rolling Stone. “They say ‘never work with children or animals’ because they’re difficult, but that cow just stood there and looked at us. We shot other lots of pictures that day, and on the back cover you’ve got three cows in a formation, it looks like three airplanes in formation, wheeling out of the sky. We took it back to the band and everybody went, ‘That’s it. As it is. That’s it.’”

Atom Heart Mother proved a watershed record for Pink Floyd: giving the band their first UK No.1, it also made a significant breakthrough in the US, where their record label used the artwork on a billboard in Los Angeles’ Sunset Strip. Unquestionably one of the best Pink Floyd album covers, the Atom Heart Mother sleeve was especially groundbreaking because it was issued without either the band’s name or album title on the sleeve.

“The record company fought to have lettering on it and, to their credit, the band said, ‘Absolutely not,’” Aubrey Powell remembered. “It was one of the first times we were able to achieve that and it was a perfect example of lateral thinking. It’s one of my most favourite album covers.”

Photography and design: Hipgnosis (Storm Thorgerson & Aubrey Powell)

6: ‘Delicate Sound Of Thunder’ (1988)

Storm Thorgerson’s concept for Pink Floyd’s 1988 live album, Delicate Sound Of Thunder, was inspired by both surrealist artist Meret Oppenheim’s Object (Le Déjeuner En Fourrure) (Object (Breakfast In Fur)) and Salvador Dalí’s disturbing dreamscapes. The latter’s artistic vision is especially apparent in the man wearing the suit of lights in the foreground of the image, which Thorgerson told the NME came from “being at a gig and thinking how can I sum up Floyd live – Mr Light meets Mr Sound”. Incidentally, the birds surrounding the man in the distance were real. “They were released from behind the far rock at the time of shooting,” Thorgerson confirmed.

Photography: Andy Earl, Anthony May | Design: Storm Thorgerson (art direction), John McGill, Jon Crossland, Nexus (graphics)

5: ‘The Piper At The Gates Of Dawn’ (1967)

Pink Floyd’s debut album, The Piper At The Gates Of Dawn, isn’t just a contender for the greatest psychedelic rock album for all time; its sleeve presents an iconic visual representation of psychedelia.

Unquestionably one of the best Pink Floyd album covers, the remarkable shot was captured by photographer Vic Singh, better known for his work in the fashion industry, but with a studio in central London, a flat in the ultra-hip King’s Road and a burgeoning friendship with The Beatles’ George Harrison. The latter connection proved invaluable after Singh had been commissioned to shoot Pink Floyd’s album cover.

“They’d sent me an advance copy of the album and I was amazed by it,” Singh said in an interview with Louder. “It sounded very alien to begin with, but then I began to understand the kind of thing they were aiming at and I wanted to come up with a picture that reflected that. I had this prism lens George Harrison gave me, which splits an image, which I thought might be perfect for the sleeve.”

With help from the lens, the colourful clothes Singh asked the band to wear for the shoot and careful positioning to get the lighting right, the photographer perfectly captured the astounding kaleidoscopic image adorning The Piper At The Gates Of Dawn’s sleeve. Years later, he recalled how enjoyable the shoot had been for all concerned.

“We had the Piper music blasting out of these big speakers I had in the studio, you could hear it right down the street,” he told Louder. “They started to get into it, particularly Syd. They could see that if everything was done right, it would look really good.”

Photography: Vic Singh | Design: Syd Barrett (rear cover)

4: ‘The Division Bell’ (1994)

For 1994’s The Division Bell, Storm Thorgerson came up with the idea of two large metal heads, each approximately the height of a double-decker bus, which were erected in a field in Ely, Cambridgeshire. The sculptures were positioned together and photographed in profile, and can be seen as either two faces talking to each other, or as a single, third, face. Thorgerson explained that the “absent third face” was a reference to Syd Barrett. The sculptures were devised by Keith Breeden and constructed by John Robertson, while Ely Cathedral is visible on the horizon in Robert Truman’s cover photograph.

The Division Bell’s mysterious, Easter Island-esque heads have since enjoyed a remarkable afterlife. In 2001, they were installed in the Rock And Roll Hall Of Fame in Cleveland, Ohio, and in 2017 they again crossed the Atlantic to feature prominently in the Pink Floyd: Their Mortal Remains exhibit at London’s Victoria & Albert Museum.

Photography: Robert Truman | Design: Storm Thorgerson (Hipgnosis), Keith Breeden, John Robertson

3: ‘Animals’ (1977)

Taking the idea that “pigs might fly” in the most literal sense, Roger Waters suggested that 1977’s Animals should be housed in a sleeve featuring a photograph of London’s Battersea Power Station, with a pig floating between its chimneys.

Though not entirely convinced by the idea, the Hipgnosis team nonetheless set about building a 40-foot, helium-filled pig, which Waters promptly named Algie. The pig’s creation, however, proved to be the least of everyone’s worries, as the three-day cover shoot descended into chaos. On the second day, the cable securing Algie in place snapped and the pig flew away, going on to interrupt the flightpath at London’s Heathrow Airport. All flights were grounded while Algie was recaptured. Then, for his encore, the pig again took flight that same night, ending up in a field in Kent, from where a farmer contacted Aubrey Powell to complain that Algie was scaring his cows.

Even when Hipgnosis finally got the shot they needed, there was a problem: the weather on the shoot’s third day was too sunny. Accordingly, the legendary Animals sleeve – one of the most memorable of all Pink Floyd album covers – was a hybrid. The successful shot of the pig from the third and final day of the photo shoot was superimposed onto a more ominous-looking shot of Battersea Power station captured on the first day.

Photography: Aubrey Powell, Colin Jones, Howard Bartrop, Nic Tucker, Peter Christopherson, Rob Brimson, Bob Ellis | Design: Roger Waters, Storm Thorgerson, Aubrey Powell

2: ‘Wish You Were Here’ (1975)

Wish You Were Here’s legendary artwork was a comment on the insincerity prevalent in the music industry. One of the album’s key tracks, Have A Cigar, referred directly to the subject – and the expression “Man I’ve been burnt”, in relation to being ripped off – giving Storm Thorgerson and Aubrey Powell the idea of creating a sleeve featuring two businessmen, one of whom was literally being burnt in a business deal. To capture the image in real time, the Hipgnosis team commissioned a stuntman, Ronnie Rondell, who agreed to be set on fire for the photo shoot, which took place on the back lot of Warner Bros’ studios in Burbank, California.

“There was no wind, I shot it 14 times, but on the 15th time, a gust of wind caught up and blew the fire straight in his face,” Aubrey Powell later recalled for Rolling Stone. “Immediately, his team jumped on him, sprayed him with extinguishing foam and saved his life. He just got up and said, ‘That’s it, I’m never doing this again!’ But I had it in the can.”

Photography: Aubrey Powell | Design: Hipgnosis

1: ‘The Dark Side Of The Moon’ (1973)

Selling over 45 million copies (and counting), The Dark Side Of The Moon turned Pink Floyd into one of the world’s biggest bands. However, while it’s widely regarded as the band’s creative peak, its stylish yet enigmatic sleeve is equally lauded.

Keyboardist Richard Wright inadvertently set the ball rolling when he suggested Hipgnosis work up something “really stylish, like a singular image, like a chocolate box”, which led Storm Thorgerson and Aubrey Powell to discover an image of a glass paperweight in a French physics book, giving them the idea of using a prism on the album cover.

“We drew it up on a piece of paper… with a bunch of other ideas,” Powell told Rolling Stone. “We just put the prism idea on the floor, and they all went, ‘That’s it. That’s the one. That’s amazing. That’s exactly what we want. That’s Pink Floyd.” So we employed a good friend of ours, George Hardie, to actually create the illustration, because we had no idea how to do that.

“It was a moment in time,” Powell continued, “and Storm, who always had absolutely the wildest ideas, realised the potential of it and went, ‘That’s it. It’s a triangle!’ So we got into triangles and the next thing, Storm and I were on a plane to Egypt, taking photos of the pyramids for the posters to go with the album. It’s very interesting, because it became one of the most iconic album covers of my generation. Of course I’m very proud of the status it gained.”

Photography: Hipgnosis | Design: Hipgnosis, George Hardie