Die Lit

Nick Walker photographed Playboi Carti in mid-air, diving off a stage into a packed crowd of fans with outstretched arms. The image is high-contrast black and white, with Carti in white at the top of the frame and the crowd swallowed in grain and shadow below, and the idea came from a reference photo of an old punk rock show.

That punk feeling matched the album, whose chaotic shows made Carti one of the most exciting live acts in rap. A$AP Rocky revealed the cover on 10 May 2018, the day before the album came out on AWGE and Interscope. Fans soon fixated on a bearded, long-haired man in the crowd who many thought looked like Dave Grohl.

In 2023 the man was identified as the actor Francisco Marcano, who said he had been unaware that his image would be used. The mystery added to the photo's legend, and the stage-dive shot has become one of the defining images of the rage era that Die Lit helped launch.