Album Cover Analysis: MUSE [The Resistance]

MUSE are very well known for their extremely artistic and abstract album artwork. The typically intergalactic image shows a solitary figure staring at planet Earth from space surrounded by a kalaeidoscopic mosaic.

Although intended to be deliberately quite abstract, the image relates to the band's usual lyrics themes such as the world, politics, conspiracy theories, science fiction, conflicts, and space. It's also an immediate attention catcher with the use of bold colours filling highly defined shapes. This overall theme provides a brilliant potential for extending the album art to t-shirts and other merchandise which people will happily buy (for quite a bit of money) at their concerts.

Of course the MUSE logo again features prominently in the top corner of their album artwork and this has been the case for all four previous studio albums.

The artwork for 'The Resistance' won Best Art Vinyl 2009.

The back cover serves the main functions you'd expect of an album. It displays the track titles and numbers and contains copyright information.

The text on the back cover uses many different colours seen on the front of the album which creates a colour scheme for the album as a whole. You also see the colourful writing on the edges and all the writing is made to stand out through the use of a lightly coloured background.

On the back there is an image of the band walking down a street looking very casual but smart. The back and white image and casual nature of it show a maturity to this, thier 5th studio album.