What happens when a little extra cardboard changes everything.

In record packaging, no format carries more weight, physically or symbolically, than the gatefold sleeve. Oversized and deliberately tactile, it demands engagement. A standard jacket reveals its contents at a glance; if you’re lucky, a printed inner sleeve will add another layer of context. A gatefold makes the listener open, unfold, absorb. It adds gravitas. Whether used to house a double LP or to elevate a single album, it signals that the contents deserve closer attention.

During the peak decades of vinyl production, gatefolds were common. Jazz labels used them for liner notes and session photography. Rock bands filled them with artwork, lyrics, and visual excess. They offered space for information, mood, mythology, and message. Today, however, where vinyl pressing is costly and production margins thin, gatefolds are increasingly rare. Their presence now often reflects a deliberate design choice rather than necessity.

“It’s like when you get into an Audi or a BMW. You shut the door and it has that sound,” Patrick McCarthy, co-founder of Temporal Drift and former label manager for Light in the Attic, told me a few years ago, when discussing the work of famed jacket manufacturer Stoughton Printing. “It’s this almost imperceptible quality, but you know it when you have it in your hands.”

The records featured below come from our own collection: favorites, curiosities, and sleeves we keep coming back to. Some are iconic, others more obscure, but each one uses the gatefold for more than just liner notes or filler. Below, a look at what happens when that extra space is taken seriously through design, layout, and intention. In various ways, each shapes the way the record is heard.

Albert Ayler – Love Cry (Impulse!)

Robert and Barbara Flynn shaped the visual language of Impulse! Records during its most vital years, working with producer Bob Thiele to give the label a shock-of-the-new unified identity. With striking orange-and-black color schemes, sharp typography, and glossy gatefolds, their designs mirrored the music’s intensity. Impulse! sleeves often featured photography by Bob Gomel, Arnold Newman, Ted Russell, and Pete Turner, giving the records a clean, modernist edge.

Gatefold liner notes on jazz records were framing devices, opinion columns, sometimes straight-up sermons. Critics like Nat Hentoff, Leonard Feather, and Stanley Crouch filled that space with context, backstory, and bold claims. The notes gave listeners a foothold, laying out the session’s stakes and locating the artist inside a larger scene. Some felt like manifestos. Others like liner-length press releases. All of them shaped the way you heard the record.

Like Blue Note, Impulse! built trust through design; fans bought albums sight unseen, confident the packaging would be as adventurous as the sounds inside. The Love Cry cover captures Albert Ayler in close-up, eyes open, mouth mid-sound, half shout, half prayer. Set against a blank background with pyschedelic titling, the image feels less like promotion and more like documentation: a moment frozen just before liftoff. Inside, an overview of the record by Frank Cofsky.

Arvo Part – Tabula Rasa (ECM)

The original Tabula Rasa LP, released on ECM in 1984 (ECM 1275), is one of the label’s most restrained and striking designs. The cover is a pale wash of off-white and blue-grey. Typography is minimal: Arvo Pärt / Tabula Rasa in beige and blue, with song titles and performers. It looks more like a concert guide then an album cover.

ECM’s gatefolds in the ’70s and ’80s followed a strict visual logic: minimal text, centered layouts, subdued colors, and a sense of restraint. Under Manfred Eicher’s direction, with designers like Barbara Wojirsch and Dieter Rehm, the label treated album covers as extensions of the music. The gatefold wasn’t for excess—it was for space. White space, silence, breathing room.

Designed by Wojirsch, Tabula Rasa reflects Pärt’s tintinnabuli style. The gatefold opens to sparse liner notes, wide margins, no ornamentation. Just names, titles, and structure.

David Bowie – Blackstar

Here’s David Bowie’s longtime graphic design collaborator Jonathan Barnbrook discussing Bowie’s embrace of inventive gatefold design. “He understood the value of the image on a record cover, when other people had forgotten about it. We had a renaissance in the 1970s and 1980s of album covers because the format of vinyl, but then it dropped when CDs were introduce. There are still good record/CD covers around, but a lot of time nowadays the cover just had to be ‘nice,’ it wasn’t a thing that provoked discussion, our covers wanted to have that discussion again. Some people hated them, some people really liked them.

For Bowie’s swan song, ★, Barnbrook designed a black gatefold with a die-cut black star on the outer jacket that reveals a photo printed on the inner sleeve, visible only as you remove the record. In full light, the black star reflects — gloss on matte, creating a shifting, spectral image. Under very bright light (and UV), other subtle elements emerge, adding to the idea that meaning is not fixed, but uncovered. Barnbrook, who had worked with Bowie before (Heathen, Reality, The Next Day), called this design Bowie’s “parting gift.”

Broadcast – The Noise Made by People

“I think what probably triggered my interest in graphic design was being surrounded by records and comics, which I loved the look of,” graphic designer Julian House said of his work. House, who studied graphic design at the same university as Broadcast, got his start on their earliest releases. For The Noise Made By People, House crafted the gatefold to suggest liner notes on classic jazz albums, flipping it by offering no photos and written gibberish.

“I wouldn’t have seen it as graphic design but from there comes my interest in what I’d say was applied or commercial art. I think its the ‘pulp’ end of things which still informs me today, as much as classic design.. Strange old vinyl LPs, paperback books, found ephemera.”

Kikagaku Moyo – Kumoyo Island

The gatefold for Kumoyo Island, Kikagaku Moyo’s 2022 farewell, was designed by Dutch artist Gijs Frieling, whose work blends psychedelic color with folk-religious motifs. The cover shows a patterned couch in a dreamlike room: Sunlight, water, and foliage melting together into a soft hallucination. Open the gatefold and the image expands seamlessly, with no break in tone or texture. Credits and tracklist are integrated into the artwork, never pulling focus. It’s less album packaging than painted environment—immersive, detailed, and quietly devotional

There are tens of thousands of gatefolds out in the world. Some are iconic, others barely remembered. In an era when vinyl is expensive to produce and packaging often gets cut, we’d like to see more new releases take the gatefold seriously. When it’s done right, that extra space doesn’t just hold a record. It makes the whole thing land harder.