The Eighties Never Left

I don’t know why Fulale’s album covers work, but they do. This Melbourne artist took Drake, Rihanna, Kendrick Lamar, Taylor Swift, all the contemporary names, and dressed them in 80s packaging—the specific kind of neon and chrome and leather that only that decade managed. The covers don’t look ridiculous. They look like they should have existed.

That’s the weird part. You’d expect these artists to look out of place, anachronistic, a joke. But they don’t. Rihanna in 80s production design still reads as Rihanna. Drake still seems untouchable. The visual language changes—neon replaces LED, film grain replaces digital clarity—but the artists themselves don’t diminish. It’s like some core thing about what makes them matter transcends the era.

The 80s have become this cultural default we all return to. Not because we’re actually nostalgic for them—most people weren’t alive then, or don’t remember them—but because the aesthetic is available. Fashion cycles through it constantly. Music producers sample it. Stranger Things made it feel like a lost world worth missing. But what Fulale’s work suggests is simpler: these artists would have been just as dominant in any era. The 80s filter isn’t making them better or worse. It’s just showing that Drake would have been Drake, whether the decade was the 2010s or the 1980s.

Maybe that’s all nostalgia is anyway—trying to imagine that something timeless was always timeless, even in moments we never lived through.