From Kanye to Juice WRLD: 5 Album Covers Designed by Takashi Murakami

Takashi Murakami is one of the most recognizable artists alive. His signature Superflat style, rooted in Japanese anime, manga, and pop culture, has earned him a place in major museums and luxury fashion houses. But his fingerprints are also all over your music library, and most people have no idea. Here are five album covers designed by Murakami that prove fine art and hip-hop have always belonged together.

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Kanye West – Graduation Released: September 7, 2007

This is where it all started. The partnership between Ye West and Murakami developed when the rapper visited Murakami’s Kaikai Kiki studio during a trip to Japan, and the production process was collaborative, with West constantly sharing new ideas with Murakami and his team via email. The result was Dropout Bear reimagined in full Superflat glory, launched into a surreal, candy colored universe. Murakami later animated the artwork into the music video for “Good Morning,” making it one of the rare cases where an album cover extended into a full visual world. Rolling Stone named it the fifth best album cover of the year. For many people, this was their first encounter with Murakami’s work without even knowing it.

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Future – Future Released: February 17, 2017

This one flew under the radar almost entirely. The artwork shows Future blurred in a haze of yellow smoke while shaking his watch around. There are no signature Murakami flowers, no cartoon characters, no psychedelic Superflat palette. It looks nothing like his other work, which is exactly why most fans never connected it to him. The cover has a raw, almost street photography quality to it, restrained and atmospheric in a way that sits completely outside Murakami’s known visual language. It was only after fans and journalists dug into the credits that his name surfaced. For a self-titled album built around Future doubling down on his own identity, it made sense to strip everything back and let the man speak for himself visually.

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J Balvin – Colores Released: March 12, 2020

Balvin said in an Instagram post: “This cover represents dreams because I always wanted to work with Takashi Murakami. Five years ago I drew a flower and didn’t know he would end up collaborating with me. And what better way to show color than flowers? It was meant to be.”The cover is exactly what the album title promises: a full-on explosion of Murakami’s signature smiling flowers, each one a different color, stacked and layered across the frame. Of all the covers on this list, Colores feels the most at home with Murakami’s established style. The flowers are his most iconic motif, and Balvin gave him an entire album concept to build around them. The collaboration made sense on every level.

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Kids See Ghosts – Kids See Ghosts Released: June 8, 2018

For the Kids See Ghosts album cover, Murakami reimagined his 2001 painting Manji-Fuji, imbuing it with new meaning nearly eighteen years later. The background comes alive with washes of pinks and blues that suggest a sunset or perhaps a sunrise, with the ambiguity being intentional and reflecting the sonic mood of the album, where beginnings and endings blur. Avantarte Two new characters appear alongside the original oval figures, including a ghost balanced on a floating serpent cloud, all of them staring directly at the viewer. Given that the album deals openly with mental health, ego death, and rebirth, the artwork carries real thematic weight. Murakami didn’t create something new for this cover. He revisited something old and let it mean something different.

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Juice WRLD – The Party Never Ends Released: November 29, 2024

Juice WRLD approached Murakami to do a project several weeks before his untimely death, meaning the collaboration was never fully completed as originally intended. The cover features a Murakami illustrated version of Juice WRLD rendered in his cartoon style against a vivid background, and the internet had a divided reaction from the moment it dropped. Some fans felt it didn’t do justice to his legacy. Others appreciated the connection to Murakami’s broader body of work with artists in the same cultural space. What makes this cover significant beyond the debate is what it represents, a project that began as a living collaboration and ended as a tribute. The art carries the weight of that unfinished story whether you love the cover or not.

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Murakami has built a career on refusing to separate high art from popular culture, and these five covers are proof of that philosophy in practice. The next time one of these albums comes up in your rotation, you’ll hear it a little differently knowing who made the face of it.

-Reniel, Wav Check founder