Happy Stranger Things day! Today is November 6th, the day Will Byers went missing in the show’s first season and a good opportunity for me to head back into the upside-down. A few years ago, I had published a really extensive collection of tribute covers for the first two seasons, mainly based on movies from the 80s. After weeks and weeks of creative labor I thought that I was more or less done with Stranger Things. I’ve made just too many covers back then and there were not enough 80s cult hits left for me to tackle. But when I recently binged the series with my daughter, I was once again overcome with that warm and cozy 80s childhood nostalgia. And I actually found myself researching again, looking around to see if there was any source material left for me to make new tribute covers. Turns out, oh yes, tons. Lots and lots!

Season Three

To be honest, I wasn’t the biggest fan of the third season. It was basically more of the same, with some questionable writing and a few exaggerated characters. But at the same time the show still had a lot of heart and some scenes in this season really pull at your heartstrings. It’s hit and miss for me, though my recent re-watch pushed me over the fence and I’m more at home in the supporters’ camp now. The series is simply fun. And it has a kick-ass soundtrack which is another big plus for me.

I like to embed different covers into the albums of my digital media library. It’s an elegant and subtle way of associating certain tracks with specific characters or scenes, without having to resort to utilities such as custom tags or descriptions in the lyrics field. Stranger Things is a prime example of this and so I did something I haven’t done in a while: I created custom covers based on individual character poster sets (#5 to #18).

The effort involved was huge. I wanted to have smooth transitions between the individual covers and so I had to take the posters apart and reassemble them completely. I’ve put the lower funfair section in its original width onto each cover to serve as an unchanging base. All other visual elements are different for all covers. The firework sky in the upper part was taken in full height from the posters, which means that I had to fill the empty spaces to the left and right of the poster with new image information using Photoshop’s AI tools. Well, it was complicated, let’s just leave it at that. Finally, I painstakingly cut out all the characters using Photoshop’s lasso tool and re-added them as a new overlaying layer.

Season Four

The fourth season was the original reason I started to work on this collection. I didn’t like the fact that the style of the official soundtrack covers differed from the cover artworks of previous seasons, so I went ahead and matched the texts, font designs and the small Netflix logo for all of the seasons released so far. Please also check out my older blog posts to find matching covers for the previous seasons.

The official soundtrack album for the fourth season of Stranger Things (#23) was also released in four special editions, each one with a unique design, exclusively produced for one of the four major US retailers (#24 to #27). I re-assembled these covers using different source images to get the highest resolution and best quality possible. The remaining character covers (#28 to #45) were thankfully not as elaborate as those for the third season. All that’s necessary were slight adjustments in contrast and brightness, as well as the identical placement of the logos and text.

Tribute Covers

Which brings us to today’s main attraction. I have practiced the art of tribute covers in the past, and not too little, I can tell you. However, it’s been some time since my last foray into these realms, so it was highly overdue to return to them, if you ask me. The picture galleries below are based on the best, best-looking and, above all, most replicable music albums of the 80s. Yes, that’s right, after successfully scouring the 80s movie and film music landscape for seasons one and two, my recent attention has turned to popular music albums.

The research necessary was unprecedented! I sifted through countless top-lists, from NME to Pitchfork to Rolling Stone, read loads and loads of reviews and examined the most iconic cover artworks of the 80s, according to the very friendly and not at all biased communities of Rate Your Music and Last.fm. At the end of this month-long process, I had a whopping fifty-seven(!) different custom covers, many of which are diegetic or in-universe, as if these albums had been recorded and released by the characters in the series.

Take a look at the image description if you want to know the originals. Or take a guess for yourself if you feel like it. Either way, have fun on this alternative and somewhat “stranger” than usual trip through the musical landscape of the 80s!

(side-note: There are a few non-80s albums in there too, but every one of them has a direct connection to Stranger Things, I promise. Do you know them all?)

Season Three

Season Four

A big shout out goes to Edzer Roukema, whose website I stumbled across during my research and who already had the idea for Stranger Things music album tribute covers way back in 2019, when he was commissioned by Netflix to produce an Instagram advertising campaign. I’ve included his original album designs in this blog post (#50, #51, #62, #63) and also based some of my own custom covers on original posters by him (#60, #64, #65).

I’d also like to note that six of these custom covers were created using fan art. One of them is a Stranger Things inspired TV screen by ArtStation user Sarah Mai (#56). And also a drawing of the Starcourt Mall monster I have found on DeviantArt (#70). Unfortunately, I couldn’t find any sources for the remaining ones (#79, #82, #91, #98).

On all the other custom covers I resorted entirely to official posters, wallpapers, publicity stills or promo photos. I had to use many different Photoshop techniques, such as colour lookup post processing, black and white colorization, 3D extrusion or generative fill. Not to mention the countless number of font designs that I tried to recreate as accurately as possible. But I’m more than happy with the results!

Now I can’t help but wonder what my approach will be for the inevitable tribute covers collection of the final season? Really, I have no – bloody – idea!