Donda

Donda arrived with no image at all. The cover is a plain black square, with no title, no name and no picture. It is the end point of a long run of public false starts. In July 2020 Kanye West posted a proposed cover by Pierre-Louis Auvray: an infrared landscape in orange and red, with figures, a sun and a moon against green mountains and purple clouds. A year later, before the first listening event in Atlanta on 22 July 2021, promotional art used a detail from a 2007 gouache by Louise Bourgeois, a woman in monochrome red with a ponytail flowing behind her.

West never explained the black square. The album is named after his mother, Donda West, who died in 2007, and black is the colour of mourning, which is how most listeners read it. The emptiness also fits the way the record was made: it was performed in stadiums, rebuilt between events and changed even after release. On the day it appeared, West wrote that Universal had put the album out "without my approval", which suggests the blank cover may have been as much a sign of an unfinished process as a statement.

The Bourgeois image caused its own stir, since early reports wrongly said North West had drawn it, and Artnet pressed the society representing her estate on whether permission had been given. Days later Drake used a Damien Hirst work for Certified Lover Boy, and the two covers were compared as a contest of fine-art names. Donda was released on 29 August 2021.