The best David Bowie albums
In a characteristically quirky manner, David Bowie once declared, “If it’s wearing a pink hat and a red nose and it plays the guitar upside down, I’ll go and look at it. I love to see people being dangerous”.
It is a quote that is perhaps the most indicative of his style that he offered up in his entire chatterbox life. He was an endless slew of superlatives, but the area where he excelled beyond any of his peers is just how revolutionarily daring he was as an artist. When the world zigged, he zagged. And that trailblazing lightning bolt that he flashed through mainstream culture remains a beacon for us all to aspire towards in our own humble ways.
He was always figuring out novel ways in which he could contribute to shaping a better society, making this a subject of play and endless creation. As Bowie once joked, “I reinvented my image so many times that I’m in denial that I was originally an overweight Korean woman.” With each of those dazzling reinventions came a bold artistic step away from the will of the gallery into a world of uncertain artistic progression, with characters churned out at alarming speeds. Just as he was finally finding a smattering of fame with Ziggy Stardust, he killed him off.
Just as ‘Heroes’ landed him in the commercial mainstream, he decided to star in his Broadway debut with a prosthetics-free interpretation of The Elephant Man. And all of this finally culminated in ‘I Can’t Give Everything Away’, one final song that proved so poignantly brazen in the face of mortality, complete with the whistle of refrains from his career past, that it retained the joyous mystique he graced us with and confirmed a suspicion held by many fans: Bowie forever had one foot in the future and was orchestrating things from afar.
As a writer whom Bowie greatly admired by the name of Hunter S Thompson once opined in adrenalised prose: “Life should not be a journey to the grave with the intention of arriving safely in a pretty and well preserved body, but rather to skid in broadside in a cloud of smoke, thoroughly used up, totally worn out, and loudly proclaiming, ‘Wow! What a Ride!’”. Bowie had one hell of a ride, and the wavering waltz of his back catalogue proves just that.
Below, we’re offering an introductory crash course on his best albums. You can find our complete ranking here.
Far Out’s list of the best David Bowie albums:
Bowie’s definitive best album: ‘The Rise and Fall of Ziggy Stardust and the Spiders from Mars’
Release Date: June 1972 | Producer: Ken Scott & David Bowie | Label: RCA
Of all the assets that Bowie brought to the table, the superlative that shines most seraphically is just how revolutionarily daring he was as an artist. In his eyes, risk was an occupational hazard for an artist worth their salt. After all, at this point, the ‘60s dream might have been in the gutter, but his musical hopes weren’t far from joining it in the rubble of what could’ve been.
All the same, he decided to attempt to reinvigorate youth culture with the creation of a messianic rockstar receiving signals from space. The sheer boldness of such a move imbues this album with a sense of drama and energy that was hitherto unknown in music. It has magnificent lyrics, such as “It was cold, and it rained, so I felt like an actor”, and a song that opens with “I’m an alligator” combined with searing solos in ‘Moonage Daydream’, and perfect pop songs, such as ‘Starman’.
It is a complete album, such that when you first think of Bowie, it is Ziggy Stardust. Without this album, you sense that not only the many masterpieces that followed in his discography wouldn’t have come to fruition, but also the countless others who were stirred by this astounding whirlwind of a record.
Defining track: ‘Moonage Daydream’
Bowie’s first masterpiece album: ‘Hunky Dory’
Release Date: December 1971 | Producer: Ken Scott & David Bowie | Label: RCA
Throughout the 1960s, David Bowie failed to triumph in every sense. Whether it was disastrous multi-media mime acts, dashed attempts to copy Simon and Garfunkel, or strange dance troupes destined to flounder. While these flapping years might not have brought success, they did define him as a force of pure creativity.
Then, towards the end of the decade, he began to find his feet. In 1969, he released David Bowie, containing gorgeous, earnest folk songs in the form of ‘Letter to Hermione’, and his brilliant breakthrough hit, ‘Space Oddity’, but it still carried the sense that he didn’t quite know what he was. Then, in the 1970s, The Man Who Sold the World arose as a record of great quality, but the heavier rock he was going for didn’t quite fit the bill.
However, in 1971, things suddenly fell into place with Hunky Dory. In many ways, it contained an amalgamation of what had gone before, but it was more confident, forthright and distinctly more Bowie than its predecessors. The wild and wavering record is held up by gorgeous melodies that guide you through the strange world he has crafted. Once again, it wasn’t a hit. But, if anything, the commercial failure of something of this undeniable quality taught him to “never play to the gallery”, and he carried that tenet throughout his life.
Defining track: ‘Oh! You Pretty Things’
Bowie’s most experimental album: ‘Station to Station’
Release Date: January 1976 | Producer: Harry Maslin & David Bowie | Label: RCA
Experimentalism defined David Bowie’s oeuvre. While there are revered artists who found a style and stuck with it, Bowie never once made the same record twice. That’s far from an easy task for a solo artist. However, he got around this in a clever and almost catastrophic way. By inventing characters he could inhabit, he was never bound to ‘Bowie’ by anything other than name—each record created the chance for him to be a new act.
Station to Station was perhaps his darkest turn. The fascistic Thin White Duke character he had conjured pushed him close to “insanity”. However, it is that daring ordeal that makes the album so gripping. It’s a fractured record in every sense, as Harry Maslin, who produced the album alongside Bowie, explained: “If you listen to the rhythms specifically on this album, there are very strange things going on rhythmically between all the instruments… If nothing else, David’s a genius when it comes to working out rhythmic feels. He was the mainstay behind it all.”
It’s only six songs, of which only ‘Golden Years’ is truly fit for the radio, but the record further helped establish Bowie as a radical artist. It’s an album that takes no prisoners, Bowie included, but readily frees the listener from the handcuffs of reality in a frenzied waltz of darkness and grooves.
Defining track: ‘Station to Station’
Bowie’s most underrated album: ‘Scary Monsters (And Super Creeps)’
Release Date: Septemeber 1980 | Producer: Tony Visconti & David Bowie | Label: RCA
Although Bowie eventually found success in the 1970s, he was never quite settled nor successful enough to rest on his laurels and lavish his ideas with oodles of time and painstaking attention. Everything was done in a flurry, governed by factors beyond his control. Moreover, he had a monkey on his back to boot, and this frequently meant that chaotic cocaine would ruffle the hair of his most pristine ideas. That all changed when he sobered up and settled down towards the end of the era.
Tony Visconti, the producer with whom Bowie made 12 in-studio and two live albums, felt much the same. Nothing had ever been as smooth sailing in the studio as he had hoped. Before every record the duo would make together, they would proclaim, “Let’s make this our Sgt Pepper’s! We’re going to take nine months, and we’re going to do everything we want to do.” Visconti claims that Scary Monsters (And Super Creeps) was the closest they ever got to that pinnacle.
From top to bottom, the record captures what Bowie was all about: a presider over a menagerie of weird and wonderful influences coming together to produce a blistering cacophony of unrivalled creativity. It’s an album that only he could’ve made, yet he could never have made it alone. It is, without doubt, one of his greatest attributes as an artist that he wasn’t unhinged by his own sense of individualism and was happy to celebrate the creative vision of others. So, as the band played around with his abstract ideas, buoyed by the sense of freedom abounding from his position behind the mixing desk, Visconti began to hear “magic taking place“. There might have been bigger albums to come from Bowie in the ’80s, but there are very few in his entire discography that are better.
Defining track: ‘Teenage Wildlife’
The album that defined him Bowie: ‘Blackstar’
Release Date: January 2016 | Producer: Tony Visconti & David Bowie | Label: Columbia
For David Bowie, life and art were interchangeable—they were one and the same. Every album saw him look at society and his place within it. With Blackstar, he knew he was standing on disappearing ground. Realising a cancer diagnosis, he was forced to look at the finite time he had left, and he stared down the barrel masterfully with his closing statement.
It was a record designed by the man himself to encapsulate his legacy. In a literal sense, there are echoed refrains from songs gone by; in a figurative sense, there is a litany of his beloved motifs. In typical Bowie fashion, there are also hits. It would have been a masterful piece of work just as a showdown with his mortality with unerring grace, but the fact that it is also catchy marks the work of a man who spent a lifetime studying the shapes of music.
Once again, he also drew upon the talents of others, proving that even in his final moments, he was a selfless force. Opting for a jazz band proved he was also still more than willing to take creative risks. With every ounce of his being poured into the album, he bowed out with another masterpiece.
Defining track: ‘I Can’t Give Everything Away’
Hipster’s choice for Bowie’s best album: ‘Low’
Release Date: January 1977 | Producer: Tony Visconti & David Bowie | Label: RCA
Which star, having recently found fame and success for the first time, would go into an anticipated record and decide to make up a language and sing it over strange ambient tones? Such strange and unknowable creative whims are what made Bowie a captivating artist for fans to follow, and Low is a record that reaps the rewards.
The definitive album of the so-called ‘Berlin Trilogy’ welcomes you into an alternate world. Alongside Visconti and Brian Eno, Bowie engineered an immersive space of eerie wistfulness. It would be wrong to call the record ‘escapist’ because, factually, it heightens your sense of the world around you, embellishing it with a peculiar filter of magic, wonder, dread, despair, and a whole host of other competing paradoxes.
The blend of futuristic electronic ambience and the bluesy core of traditional instruments, like the rustic harmonic tangled with sci-fi synth in ‘A New Career in a New Town’, is an innovative move that helped point newfound soundscapes for the decade that followed in the right direction, proving his towering influence as a musician. Indeed, on a suitably mystic day, there is no doubt that while picking Bowie’s best, making the hip bee-line for Low may well be the right one.
Defining track: ‘Warszawa’
