A visual album is a type of concept album in which the album is accompanied by a feature-length film or individual music videos for every song. Usually, the film, or "visuals", emphasize the album's overall theme and serve as the "visual vehicle" that enhances the experience.
Though music films and videos accompanying albums are not new in popular culture, the term achieved prominence in modern usage after the release of American singer-songwriter Beyoncé's 2013 self-titled album.
Definitions
The definition of what constitutes a visual album remains a subject of debate. Being a largely experimental medium, its execution varies from artist to artist. According to
Screen Rant's Megan Summers, "visual albums are linked music videos or films released in conjunction with a record".
In one of the first articles written about the artform, Landon Palmer of
Film School Rejects notes that "visual albums stage, sometimes with interruptions, the majority of a musician or band’s LP ... cohesive works of musical artistry rather than conveniently divisible bits of audio information".
According to Judy Berman of
Pitchfork, visual albums result from the "synergistic connection between music and cinema that dates back to the latter art form’s birth".
While films like
Purple Rain and
A Hard Day's Night are classics that combine music and long-form visuals, Kylie Lynne of
AllMusic argues that such films "had the corresponding album as a soundtrack with the majority of focus on the storyline and dialogue when the music was not playing", separating them from visual albums in which the music is the primary audio component.
History and development
Pre-MTV era
The synergy between music and cinema has existed since cinema's early history, with the first
Sound film in 1927,
The Jazz Singer, being a musical. When it became clear that talkies were to become the dominant form of cinema, there was a significant rise in musicians making use of the visual medium to bring their music to new audiences. Artists like Bessie Smith and Fred Astaire took advantage of this and appeared on television performing their songs. Soon enough, the music film as a concept would become a cultural phenomenon in 1964, at the height of
Beatlemania, when the
The Beatles released
A Hard Day's Night. The following decade saw a massive leap in the music industry's use of visual media, with Blondie's
Eat to the Beat, released in 1979, being the first album in the rock era to be accompanied by videos for every song.
MTV era and the longform film
The rise of MTV and the popularity of
Michael Jackson in the 1980s cemented the status of music videos as integral to the music industry.
Jackson would eventually stretch his cinematic ambitions to feature-film length with 1988's
Moonwalker, just as Prince had done four years earlier with
Purple Rain.
In 1986, British band
The The made music videos for each track to promote their album
Infected. In 1985, for
Pete Townshend's album
' was a film based on the album, directed and "adapted for longform video" by Richard Lowenstein. Janet Jackson also released a similar form of visual album with her Rhythm Nation 1814 film short in 1989. Lemon Jelly 2005 album 64-'95
and Beck's 2006 album The Information
were both released with videos for each track. Beyoncé's B'Day Anthology Video Album
marked another significant release in this era, which companioned the deluxe edition of 2006's B'Day'' and featured videos for every song.
Streaming era
The beginning of the streaming era offered artists several options of making their musical projects easily accessible to fans. The Swedish
electropop group
iamamiwhoami published a series of music videos in 2010. Described as an audiovisual project,
it was later released on their "audiovisual album"
Bounty.
The band continued the tradition, releasing
Kin in 2012,
Blue in 2014, and their subsequent albums in an audiovisual format.
R.E.M.'s final studio album, 2011's
Collapse into Now also featured at least one music video for every song, spearheaded by vocalist
Michael Stipe.
The next instance of a visual album was Beyoncé's 2013 self-titled release. Having started recording the album in the summer of 2012, she had the idea to make it a visual album in early 2013
Beyoncé would reinvent the visual album format again with her following studio album Lemonade in 2016.
The third studio album by the English musician Thom Yorke, Anima, was released on 27 June 2019 in conjunction with a 15-minute visual album of the same name on Netflix.
Other artists like Frank Ocean,
See also
