10 Worst Album Covers In Rock

Black Sabbath's time in the early '80s was spent treading water most of the time. Though the inclusion of Ronnie James Dio worked really well across records like Mob Rules and Heaven and Hell, his departure signaled the start of a pretty rough ride for the founders of heavy metal. While the arrival of Deep Purple's Ian Gillan seemed promising, the same could not be said for Born Again.

Aside from the artwork, most of this album is just a decent hard rock record with terrible production, and yet the cover is about as bad as the record itself sounds. For as wrong as this cover seems on the surface, it's not like it doesn't make sense, with this baby demon of sorts being reborn to wreak havoc on the world once again. That is, if it didn't look like it was painted by an amateur.

Coming from the same band who had one of the most menacing debut album covers of all time, this feels way below their paygrade, as if they just coerced someone from the record label to throw something together in a few minutes. Compared to some of the other menacing titles coming from the likes of Iron Maiden at the time, this feels like the first draft of an album cover that could be good only to be put out unfinished instead.