The Diary

The cover of Scarface's third solo album is bleak and quiet: a gritty, grey photograph of a bare interior, with the rapper's name in heavy red letters at the top and the title in bold white at the bottom.

Scarface, already famous as a member of the Geto Boys, made The Diary into Southern rap's most respected storytelling album. Songs like "I Seen a Man Die" and "Hand of the Dead Body" mixed street violence with paranoia, guilt and grief, and his deep, weary voice made him one of the most admired lyricists in rap.

The Diary was released on 18 October 1994 on Rap-A-Lot. The empty, colourless cover reads like the inside of a mind under pressure, a fitting image for an album that spends as much time on regret and depression as it does on bravado.