The Next Day Album Cover

When the album cover for The Next Day was revealed, many were taken aback. It was jarring, self-referential, and seemingly flippant. As simple of a design as it was to execute in mechanical terms, a lot of thought went into what it meant. It was created by Jonathan Barnbrook, who had previously designed the cover for Reality, and would later design the cover for Blackstar. The intent was to take the sheer magnitude of Bowie’s body of work and subvert it. He arrived at “Heroes”. Through that cover, he had a way to vandalize what had come before, rather than trying to apply such a treatment to something that was already subversive like the cover of Aladdin Sane. The cover of “Heroes” was earnest, and had a certain reverence to it. Putting an indifferent white text box over such an image was the perfect way to prove that nothing was sacred.