Iron Maiden, Brave New World

If there were a museum for metal album covers, Iron Maiden would have a special exhibit … or probably even its own wing. Some of this honor derives from their use of one of the most memorable—and most consistently featured—mascots in rock, Eddie.

Artist Derek Riggs gets the credit for creating Eddie and for representing him on the band’s covers for 20 years, from the eponymous debut in 1980 through Brave New World from 2000.

Sadly, however, Iron Maiden and Riggs fell out after he painted the top half of the cover featured here. He stopped designing original work for the band—and it shows, with the sub-par Eddie figures on releases like the most recent A Matter of Life and Death.

So we celebrate this cover, in which Eddie’s all-seeing gaze towers over a futuristic London, presumably as it might appear in the world of Aldous Huxley’s novel of the same name.