Data story · Albums
The colours of famous album covers, sliced left to right.
Cut a record sleeve into twelve upright strips, keep one colour from each, and lay them in a row. What is left is not the picture, just its palette in order, and the famous ones are still surprisingly easy to name.
Every strip on this page is a real Albums strip from the Huezle app, drawn by the app’s own code. More about Albums.
How to read the strips
Each strip is one album cover, cut into twelve vertical slices read from the left edge of the cover to the right. Each band is the colour that best describes its slice. There is no scale: the bands are the cover’s own colours, so black means the sleeve is black there and blue means it is blue.
No image is stored or shown, only twelve colours per album, measured from cover scans in the Cover Art Archive. A scan can differ a little from the sleeve you remember, so a slightly off shade is the scan, not the record.
How a slice gets its colour
The obvious method, taking the commonest colour in each slice, fails on exactly the covers people know best. A dark sleeve with a bright subject is mostly background in every slice, so the commonest colour is black twelve times over. Averaging the slice is worse: it turns everything to mud.
So each slice’s colour is chosen by how much of the slice it covers multiplied by how different it is from the cover’s overall colour. A small bright shape in a dark slice can win the band, the way you would describe the cover out loud: black, black, a rainbow, black.
- Left side of the cover
- Middle of the cover
- Right side of the cover
Covers that read like a description
Some strips are almost a sentence. Abbey Road is pale beige across its whole width except for three sky-blue bands in the middle. Thriller is ten off-white bands and then two near-black ones at the right-hand edge.
- Left side of the cover
- Middle of the cover
- Right side of the cover
- Left side of the cover
- Middle of the cover
- Right side of the cover
At the other extreme of colour, Saxophone Colossus is the most saturated strip of the 112: ten bands of bright blue broken by two of deep navy, a little left of centre.
- Left side of the cover
- Middle of the cover
- Right side of the cover
Why the black album is all black
Metallica’s self-titled 1991 record, known as the black album, comes out as twelve bands of pure black, the only perfectly flat strip of the 112. Its sleeve has nothing bright or large enough to stand out from the background, and the method only lets a colour win a slice when it does. A flat strip is the honest answer for a cover that really is one colour.
- Left side of the cover
- Middle of the cover
- Right side of the cover
The palest strip sits at the opposite end of the scale. Dave Brubeck’s Time Out is twelve off-white bands, every one within a few shades of its neighbours.
- Left side of the cover
- Middle of the cover
- Right side of the cover
The darkest genre is not metal. Count the near-black bands in each of the six genres and jazz comes out on top, ahead of metal, with hip-hop the least dark.
What the strips leave out
The twelve bands keep the order of colours across the sleeve and nothing else: no shapes, no faces, no lettering, and nothing about the top or bottom of the cover, since each slice runs its full height. That is why the palette alone is a fair puzzle rather than a picture. In the app the three wrong answers always come from the same genre as the right one.
The other 106 covers are puzzles in the Albums category. For more strips read left to right through a single work, try the happiest and saddest classic novels, where each band is a chapter, or Owen Wilson’s “wow”, movie by movie, where each band is five minutes of film.
Huezle shows you one cover as twelve colours and four albums to choose from. See if you can name a sleeve by its palette alone.
Download on the App StoreFree on iPhoneQuestions
Why is Metallica’s black album all black?
Its sleeve is black from edge to edge with nothing bright or large enough to stand out, so every one of the twelve slices takes the same colour. It is the only perfectly flat strip of the 112 covers.
Do these strips show the album cover?
No. Each strip is twelve colours, one per vertical slice of the cover from left to right. No image is stored, and the shapes and lettering on the sleeve are not recoverable from the colours.
Which album cover is the most colourful here?
By saturation, Sonny Rollins’ Saxophone Colossus, which comes out as ten bands of bright blue and two of deep navy.
More guides
- The happiest and saddest classic novels, chapter by chapter.The mood of 136 classic novels measured chapter by chapter: the darkest (Germinal), the brightest (Little Women) and the ones that start bright and fall apart.
- Owen Wilson’s “wow”, movie by movie.When Owen Wilson says “wow” in a movie, mapped in five-minute slices as strips of colour: the bursts, the long silences, and the film with five in five minutes.
- How to read a century of presidential elections in colour.US presidential elections since 1900 drawn as strips of colour, one band per state from west to east. Learn to read the eras from four real strips.
- When did the South flip from Democrat to Republican?The Solid South in colour: how Southern states went from voting Democratic by 90 points to reliably Republican, told in four election strips from 1920 to 2024.
Now try naming one yourself.
Huezle is free on iPhone. A new puzzle every day, four categories free forever, and no account, ads or timer.