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What was the first Sparks album cover that sucked you in while rifling through the stacks? Maybe it was the weirdly seductive aftermath of a plane crash for 1975’s Indiscreet? Or, if you’re a real sicko, the high-seas hostage event for 1974’s Propaganda? (I’m the sicko.) Even the cute bunnies striking a pose on 2006’s Hello Young Lovers is understandable. Ron and Russell Mael have never stopped adding creative kindling to the artworks behind their 26 studio albums, which, they explain, are just as essential of a selling point as the songs themselves. “We’ve always felt that visuals are really important,” Ron tells me. “There are people who downplay that and think it’s more important to focus purely on the music, but it’s all one aesthetic for us. There’s some element that’s cinematic in nature, like you’re seeing a shock from a film taken out of context and put on a cover.”
This freeze-framed ethos is as prevalent as ever on the brothers’ newest album, MAD!, which was released on May 23 — no surprise, really, given their love for the movies and treating their own songs like short films. Because we asked them nicely, the duo ranked what they believe are Sparks’s most museum-worthy album covers. Act and invest accordingly, MoMA.
9. Halfnelson (1972)
Russell Mael: Ron was big into cars at the time and went to all the car shows that would come around yearly — he would get really nice brochures and photos from all the car companies.
Ron Mael: Our father worked for a newspaper in Los Angeles in the art department, and he would bring home these press photos of cars for the upcoming year. It was like a Christmas present for me. The first album was done in a DIY way, and we didn’t have a huge budget. There’s a lot of X-Acto knife action on the cover. The car was a 1959 Oldsmobile, which was a part of General Motors. General Motors was the largest operation in the world, and there was a saying at the time: As General Motors goes, so goes the U.S. economy. I was really naïve. Before we did the cover, I wrote to General Motors and asked permission for the car. Nowadays, there’s no possible way that you would get approved. And they wrote back and said, “Of course, but can we supply you with something better?” They were really defensive about this photograph not being the highest quality.
Russel: It’s almost like Grace Kelly sitting in the back. General Motors probably wanted us to show their actual car from the outside. Oh, well. Then we had a friend take photos of us and, in a pre-PhotoShop method, he inserted us into the back window of the car.
Ron: It stands the test of time because it doesn’t look like a clean, well-designed cover. The album didn’t sell that many copies. The record company thought the problem might’ve been our [band] name, “Halfnelson.” The head of the label suggested, since we were such funny people, that “Sparks Brothers” would be a great name for us. We flinched and tried not to show our disdain too much because he thought we were like the Marx Brothers. So we thought to compromise and said, “Well, what about Sparks?” So they took that name and redid the cover. The first Sparks album is the same music as the Halfnelson album, just rereleased with the more supposedly honorable band name. It still didn’t do any better than Halfnelson. We learned our lesson very early about that.
8. MAD! (2025)
Russell: We thought it was fitting for that title to have a nice portrait of us, but then totally demolish that nice portrait and have bold, red graffiti on top of it with an exclamation mark. It doesn’t have the name of the band on the cover, which is one of our past traditions that predated this. So it has no typeface. If somebody picked up the album and had no knowledge of us, they’d think the band is called MAD!. We didn’t need the name of the band on the cover this time around. We liked that image of us and we’re expressing some madness in an angry sort of way on the cover. But then we destroy it, anyway, by having this typography obscuring our faces. There’s also one super-groovy format of the album — it’s lenticular, where the typeface disappears depending on how you hold it.
Ron: It matches a certain amount of aggression on the album, both musically and lyrically.
7. Propaganda (1974)
Ron: The photographer wanted us to jump out of an airplane.
Russell: Parachuting out of a plane with a similar motif of us being held hostage. You want us to be dumped out of a plane? We don’t think so. Visually, yeah, it would be spectacular, but for our lives and for the rest of our careers, it’s a bad idea. Then he came up with this idea of us as hostages being kidnapped and in the back of a boat. We’re bound, gagged, and all. It’s one of those covers where we think it’s like a quick scene from a movie where you don’t know what’s happened before and what’s happening after. It’s a moment in time captured from some intriguing event.
It was shot on the South Coast of England on a really stormy day, even though it looks like there’s blue skies and a beautiful ocean. It was gray and windy. I still remember gales blowing us that we had to accept after a while. You have to imagine the photographer from the angle he’s shooting from. He’s on the front of the boat going backwards with a huge tripod and on a ladder, at a high speed on a gale-force bay in the ocean. But he managed to get a really nice shot. It was incredibly uncomfortable. We were ready to get off the boat after that. And also the fact that we were tied up, so if anything unfortunate were to have happened, like the boat flipped over, we were goners.
Ron: If you look at the back cover of the album, we’re still bound and gagged, but now in the back of a cool old British sedan. Some of the other band members, similar to Halfnelson, are looking into the window of the car as Ron and I are in the back seat. The story of this kidnapping is continuing, but nobody knows what’s going on.
6. Big Beat (1976)
Ron: We got to a level that allowed us to work with Richard Avedon. When you work with Richard, you have to give in to however he wants to photograph you. We felt honored that he would do the cover. I mean, anybody that would pay him his rate he would probably do it for, but the quality of his work is unparalleled. I use the term not to build us up, but as a “celebrity photographer,” he made everybody look very special. Not always flattering, but really distinctive and interesting. At the beginning of the session, he wanted us both to come out and wear the same, large T-shirt. That didn’t work out, so we changed into the clothes you see. The one thing with Richard was the whole photo shoot took about ten minutes. He would turn to his assistant and go, “Okay, I think we got it.” We’ve done sessions that have lasted all day and they’re mediocre, but Richard took ten minutes and we have it. That’s the way good people really work.
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Russell: We asked him, “Where do we do the makeup? Who’s doing our makeup for the photo?” And he responded, “Oh, men don’t wear makeup.”
5. Kimono My House (1974)
Russell: We thought the title Kimono My House lent itself to something Japanese in nature, but something that was off-kilter. These two women were found to be part of the photo session in London. The dress is formal Japanese kimonos that look elegant, but then it disperses that elegance by having their makeup smudged and being off. We thought that would be really striking, especially to have no typography. At that time to have an album cover with no band name, no artist, or no album title was pretty forward-thinking. You have no clue who this music was coming from. Now you can’t separate it from the body of music that’s on the album — it’s one and the same.
Ron: We had done an original mock-up on our own idea. I don’t know how we drifted to that, because it was ten years before we even went to Japan. But we had a photo of a Japanese woman, and there was something about World War II on the wall behind her. She was holding her nose. We tried to do a little paste-up in a black-and-white shot of that, so it was more of a newspaper type of photo. But then it drifted into being done a little more professionally than this simple collage idea. The choice of the background color was the photographer’s choice. It’s almost like our MAD! cover, where they’re made a little bit uglier and edgier. That type of imagery always appealed to us.
4. Whomp That Sucker (1981)
Russell: Ron came up with that title. Then we thought of the idea of having it be the two of us boxing and one getting his ass kicked in a boxing match. Have a referee there and everything.
Ron: We had an exhibition match in London at the Hilton Hotel. We set up a ring in a banquet hall there and invited a lot of people to come see. We trained for about three weeks in London with this boxing trainer so we could look a little bit like we knew we were doing. So we actually did this — it might’ve been a little bit fake, but we made a three-round exhibition match look as real as possible. It was fixed in that kind of way. Even doing it where you’re not getting hit was incredibly exhausting for three rounds. So I can imagine the condition that the boxers are in. It was an amazing experience being able to have a promotional thing done as a boxing match at the time.
Russell: We also carried it through to the music video for “Tips for Teens.”
3. Angst in My Pants (1982)
Russell: It obliquely relates to the title of the album. You can read into it whatever you want. Either way, it was taking the title on, which we don’t always do. We were looking for something arresting.
Ron: This is maybe a little too arresting. It’s probably an idea that I wouldn’t have the courage to do nowadays.
Russell: We decided Ron would be in a wedding gown and we would be getting married.
Ron: I spent a lot of time at the Salvation Army buying vintage clothes. It was before there were so many vintage clothing shops that would buy all the good stuff from the Salvation Army and resell them for exorbitant prices. There was one in Santa Monica that I’d go to frequently. They had a wedding dress that looked to be for my proportions. You start thinking in the back of your mind, “What’s the story of somebody who would end up giving their wedding dress to a Salvation Army to be sold for a few dollars?” I bought it. After the shoot, we were getting played a lot on Los Angeles radio stations, especially a popular New Age one called KROQ. I donated it to that station and regret it to this day. A couple years later, they stopped playing us, and they probably threw out the wedding dress.
Russell: My sequinned suit was custom-made for me, and it became one of my stage outfits for that period. The silver went well with the wedding gown.
2. Hippopotamus (2017)
Ron: We gave the photographer a specific task: Create as realistic as you can, make a hippopotamus in an urban or upper-class suburban swimming pool.
Russell: The main conversation we had centered around suburbia, like what David Hockney accomplished with his swimming-pool images. There was a strong hint of “Hockney suburbia” and there’s a line in the song “Hippopotamus” that goes, “There’s a hippopotamus in my pool.” It’s all logical.
Ron: Sometimes, we become very literal on occasion. It keeps everyone on their toes. No animals were harmed in the shooting of this cover.
Russell: We would’ve heard it from PETA if we had done that. We actually have another album called Exotic Creatures of the Deep where we feature a show chimpanzee. We learned that chimpanzees get cranky and a couple of hours into shooting, they told us the chimp needed to take a nap. So we all had a two-hour break where that chimpanzee was sleeping.
Ron: When it got cranky, it would tear off people’s arms. So we gave it as much time as it wanted to nap. You can now imagine why a real hippopotamus wasn’t in the cards for us.
1. Pulling Rabbits Out of a Hat (1984)
Russell: It looks artificially rendered. Is Ron the ventriloquist the one manipulating me as the puppet? It’s not only on the album cover, but you could read more into it about what’s going on with Sparks. You can talk amongst yourselves about what the implication might be about Ron manipulating this puppet that happens to be me. It was our idea. Sometimes, we come up with these ideas and then need to work backwards and find a person who we think can realize the idea well.
Ron: Anytime there’s a singer of great quality, if they’re singing somebody else’s song, they’re still being steered in a general sense by the nature of that song. This is maybe a more literal statement of the fact — the songwriter’s vision and emotions are coming through you, and you’re an actor performing a script. That’s how I would read it. But what do I know?
We know, we know. Pretend the above image doesn’t have all those words; we couldn’t license the original photograph.
