Brick by Brick, Someone Was Rebuilding Every Album That Matters

Somebody built a Tumblr—this was 2014, when people still did that—dedicated entirely to recreating famous album covers in LEGO. Not as a joke. Carefully. With real attention to color blocking and proportion. Nevermind, Thriller, MF DOOM’s MM..FOOD, OK Computer, Daft Punk, Gorillaz, Kanye, Pink Floyd, the Beatles. Cover by cover, brick by brick.

What gets me is the translation problem it keeps solving. LEGO is a grid. Album art almost never is. Getting the curve of a face or the smear of a sunset to read correctly in a medium made of right angles is a real compositional problem, and whoever was running this blog solved it over and over without ever seeming to get bored.

There’s also something about the choice of subjects. These aren’t obscure covers—they’re the ones reproduced so many times they’ve become icons, which means they’re the ones most likely to trigger involuntary memory. You see the bricks, you think of the record, you think of wherever you first heard it. The LEGO version shouldn’t carry that weight and yet somehow it does.

Real labor. Real love. Someone doing a thing for no commercial reason because they wanted to see if they could. The internet used to be full of projects like that.