Music Cards

Welcome

Thank you for visiting our site about music cards.

What is a music card?

At its heart, each music card is personalised album art. This site contains music cards, featuring artists like Stephen Malkmus, Beyonce, Julien Baker and John Coltrane.

I love art associated with music, whether it's from a CD booklet, a cassette or LP insert, art on a 45 sleeve. The best had additional art folded away inside, as a treat for fans that dug more into an album, like R.E.M.'s 1990 album Out of Time, Michael Jackson's 1982 album Thriller (baby tiger!) or Wilco's 1999 album Summerteeth.

Those references are dated because I just don't buy album art any more. I'd love to see album art from 2024 albums such as Beyonce's Cowboy Carter, The Cure's Songs of a Lost World, Porridge Radio's Clouds in the Sky...,  Miles Davis' Miles in France 1963 & 1964, Cascade by Floating Points or Mount Eerie's Night Palace.

These drawings are personal (and, in my case, often crudely drawn). They're snapshots of music I listened to at certain times from the past several years, and often subtly weave in some associations from my son's life (he has a series of cards related to music that motivated his bottle-flipping phase) to things that are more recent (we have a cat, who's charming and is classified as an indoor cat).

Music cards can be:

• silly, like a sketch of Stephen Malkmus attempting to use his self-titled album as a legally valid form of identification
• slyly, humourously existential, like my son's existential card featuring The Strokes' Is This It
• kind of skillful attempts to recreate album art, like New Order's Power Corruption and Lies
• conveyors of irredeemably bad jokes, like Jon Hopkins' Singularity (link to come)

Please continue scrolling for our most recent posts, or browse all music cards.

Why they're called 'music cards'

In 2017, my son and I started creating these cards, drawing art for then-new albums that we were listening to. (Our first two music cards featured albums by the Red Hot Chilli Peppers and Wolf Parade. My son's and wife's favourite at the time was The Getaway; I was listening to Wolf Parade.)

There's more to the story, including why they're drawn on credit card-sized cards, plus the techncial details, if you want either.

Please feel free to visit all of the published music cards. 

And sign up for our mailing list to be informed of updates. We're adding more cards, usually two or so a week.