Here is what you can get with searching the MusicBrainz website, using a userscript that displays covers in more places:
date:[2016-01-01 TO 2016-12-31] release search
Or maybe searching for release groups is better, as it would exclude re-release:
firstreleasedate:[2016-01-01 TO 2016-12-31] release group search
If you want to program this, you can turn this searches in web service mode by adding /ws/2 after musicbrainz.org.