How much does album artwork actually shape the way you hear music?

This has been rattling around in my head for a while. Album artwork used to be a whole thing, a physical object you'd hold in your hands while the record played, and the visual and the sound would kind of lock together in your brain. Now most people are staring at a tiny thumbnail on a phone screen or not looking at anything at all.

I work with visuals constantly and I keep noticing how much a strong cover changes the way I actually experience a record. Not just the first impression but the whole emotional framing. Dark Horse by Nickel Creek hits differently knowing that cover. The artwork for Bjork's Homogenic feels inseparable from the sound of it. There are albums where the visual is doing real work alongside the music, not just packaging it.

But I wonder if that relationship has basically broken down for most listeners now. Streaming killed the physical format for the majority of people, and with it a lot of the intentional visual world artists used to build around a release. Some artists still go hard on visual identity, others clearly don't bother.

Does artwork actually change how you experience an album, or is it just decoration at this point? And are there specific records where you think the cover art is genuinely inseparable from the music itself?