Goblin

Tyler, the Creator is nowhere on the standard cover of Goblin. The image is a recoloured nineteenth-century portrait of William "Buffalo Bill" Cody, taken when the showman was 19, the same age Tyler was when the album came out. Tyler designed the sleeve himself, setting the title in white Cooper Black with a black outline, the same face used on his debut, Bastard. The deluxe edition swapped in a black-and-white photograph of Tyler with an upside-down cross on his forehead, blacked-out eyes and the title in pink across his nose.

The image arrived as a puzzle. In March 2011 it began appearing in ad slots on music websites, and clicking through led to buffalo-bill.net, which showed the same picture and nothing else. Later the page swapped it for an animated image of the head exploding to reveal the release date. Tyler never explained the choice of Cody, and that silence suits the record: a borrowed face from the American frontier, coloured in by a teenager who liked to provoke, standing in for an album about alter egos and an imaginary therapist.

The deluxe cover matched the black-and-white world of the "Yonkers" video, and the Cody portrait served as the backdrop for Tyler's MTV performance. Both covers announced a self-directed artist who would design almost all his own visuals from then on. Goblin was released on 10 May 2011.