AI Can Make the Album Cover. Can It Tell the Story?

For Sinalo Ngcaba, creating an album cover begins with listening.

When the Johannesburg-based visual artist is asked to create artwork for a song or album, her ears are tracking the tempo, lyrics, and energy. A fast song might need movement; a softer one might call for stillness. The image comes from what the music seems to be saying before it becomes visible.

Ngcaba, who has worked with the likes of Mr Eazi and Native Sound System, sees cover art as part of a project's emotional life.

“Sometimes you can’t really put pictures to a song when you’re listening to it,” she tells OkayAfrica, "but when you see the cover, it almost completes the story for you in such a beautiful way.”

In African music, the relationship between sound and image has a long history, from Lemi Ghariokwu’s politically charged covers for Fela Kuti to the artists and studios shaping the look of today’s releases. At its best, cover art announces a project and teaches listeners how to enter it.

As AI moves into music visuals, it is starting to reshape the creative work behind a release. The images and videos behind a rollout can help listeners understand the world of the music, and they are usually shaped by designers, photographers, illustrators, videographers, visual artists, and creative directors whose skills and labor give those images meaning.

AI can produce a polished image in seconds. But can it understand and relay the specific feeling an artist is trying to deliver visually?

The cover is only one part of that visual world. Peppeh Co., a Toronto-based creative agency, has built album-branding campaigns for projects such as Mr Eazi’s Lagos to London, M.anifest’s The Gamble, and Bien’s Alusa, Why Are You Topless. For Emmanuel Obayemi, a co-founder, the image is part of how music competes for attention in a busy world of streaming and social media.

“What stops the scroll is usually the visual first,” Obayemi tells OkayAfrica. “The music has to be good — obviously, that’s the foundation … But in a feed-based world, the image is often the thing doing the work of making me pause long enough to actually listen.”

That first impression matters because cover art is rarely just one image anymore.  Clarence Quarcoo, Obayemi's co-founder at Peppeh Co., sees a difference between a good cover and a strong artist brand. “A good cover answers ‘does this look good for this album?’” he says. “A strong brand answers ‘does this look like it could only be them?’”

For Ngcaba, it starts with the music itself. The cover and the sound, she says, need to have a “beautiful marriage.”

She points to artwork she created for Alec Lomami and LMBSKN’s 2024 EP, Somewhere, there’s something AMAZING waiting to be discovered, as an example. The musicians had imagined a desert or forest scene, with instruments and animals from their countries. But after listening to the music, Ngcaba took it in a less literal direction.

“I wanted to create more of another dimension of where they are,” she says. “The African masks, and even the little Black people with the stars, represent ancestral spirits to me. Almost like, as they’re creating this music, the surroundings come alive with it.”

For Ngcaba, a big part of building these worlds comes from collaboration. Both the musician and the artist bring their memories, taste, and instincts to the work. “You can sense the collaboration of two humans, two or more humans coming together to try to tell a story,” she says. 

“The fact that we also spend time on this, I think you can see in the work.”

It is that kind of intuition that Ngcaba finds missing in many AI-generated covers. “You can tell when something’s AI,” she says. “It just doesn’t land as strong. AI has the same kind of illustration style… even the color palettes are usually the same.”

But the issue goes beyond AI-generated visuals looking generic. The technology can also be used to copy an artist without consent. Ngcaba has seen her own work stolen and replicated using AI without her consent.

For Quarcoo, the problem goes back to how AI works. “The problem is AI has a mass approach,” he says. “It’s trained on everything and everyone, so what it gives back is basically an average.” 

“AI can mimic a style,” he says, “but it can’t hold a perspective.”

That perspective is not always grand or obvious. Sometimes it comes from something as specific as a local joke. Obayemi points to Peppeh Co.’s work on M.anifest’s 2025 album New Road and Guava Trees, whose artwork drew from a meme about an African politician commissioning a poorly executed “new road,” then pushed that familiar joke into a surreal visual world.

“That leap, from a local inside joke to something surreal and new, comes from lived context and a specific point of view,” Obayemi says. “AI can’t do that. It can only remix what already exists; it can’t reach for a reference that lives in someone’s actual memory.”

Still, none of this means AI has no place in the process. For artists with limited budgets, it can help test ideas, mock up a direction, or handle practical tasks. Ngcaba uses it for things like testing color palettes. But she draws the line at letting it become the final product.

“You can’t let it be the creative director,” she says.

Even when budgets are tight, she does not think artists have to settle for careless images.

“I understand not everyone can afford to hire an artist,” she says. “But the whole reason we are creative is to solve problems, to use what we have around us to create something new. You can literally make a cover out of a picture from your phone. There are ways.”

Recognizing that many musicians are working with real constraints, Quarcoo says what they need to protect most is their uniqueness “and their specificity, the stuff that makes them them and not just a version of a trend…”

“At the end of the day,” he adds, “taste and story are the two things AI can’t replicate.”

That may be why Ngcaba says some collaborators come back to her. They are not only returning for an image, but for the exchange behind it. It is the shared references, the conversation, and the time spent shaping a visual world together. In her view, it is human exchange that gives cover art its je ne sais quoi.

“You can’t prompt emotion, you can’t prompt culture, you can’t prompt feelings and memories,” she says. “AI will always give you something that’s not quite what you wanted.”