The Next Day
| David Bowie
The Next Day
The Next Day is the 24th and penultimate studio album by English musician David Bowie, released on 8 March 2013 on his ISO Records label, under exclusive licence to Columbia Records. The album was announced on Bowie's 66th birthday, 8 January 2013 Bowie's website was updated with the video for the lead single, "Where Are We Now ", and the single was immediately made available for purchase on the iTunes Store. It was Bowie's first album of new material in ten years, since 2003's Reality, and surprised fans and media who believed he had retired. The album was streamed in its entirety on iTunes days before its official release. The Next Day Extra, an additional disc featuring four more tracks, and remixes of songs from the original album, was released in November. The Next Day was met with critical acclaim, and earned Bowie his first number-one album in the United Kingdom since 1993's Black Tie White Noise. It was ranked as the second best album of 2013 (in a tie with Blue October's Sway) by German music magazine Kulturnews and was also nominated for the 2013 Mercury Prize. The album was nominated for Best Rock Album at the 2014 Grammy Awards and for MasterCard British Album of the Year at the 2014 Brit Awards. The album was also included in the book 1001 Albums You Must Hear Before You Die. - WIKIPEDIA
Critic Reviews
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pitchfork
On several levels, David Bowie's 24th studio album is a cunning act of sleight of hand. From the "Heroes"-referencing cover on down, he hasn't only come to terms with his past, he's making his old material work for his new material.
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The Guardian
David Bowie's eagerly awaited new album is thought-provoking, strange and filled with great songs.
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SLANT
Vital, confident, and defiantly alive, Bowie has announced his return to rock’s top table.
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RollingStone
The Next Day is the comeback Bowie fans feared would never happen. After a health scare ended his 2004 tour, he kept his distance, and most of us figured the Thin White Duke had finally rocked his last roll.
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UCR
‘The Next Day’ isn’t perfect. It’s a little too long, and some of the songs lack direction and focus. But it’s Bowie’s best album since ‘Let’s Dance,’ when he transformed himself into a dapper white soul singer and it became the bestselling record of his career.
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CoS
Invoking the “Berlin Trilogy” suggests that The Next Day might be more than meets the eye conceptually, and at the very least, should serve as a red flag that listeners’ wits should be about them. None of the record’s 14 tracks are casual affairs, and only few of them are catchy enough to overcome a passive listen.
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The Telegraph
David Bowie's new album The Next Day – his first for a decade – is a bold, beautiful and baffling electric bolt through its own mythos.
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Vanity Fair
The Next Day Is His “Roots”-Music Renaissance.
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AV/MUSIC
The Next Day isn’t great simply because it’s the return of Bowie. It’s great because it’s the return of Bowie’s voice: rich, delicate, smoky, wise. And, yes, shaded with the first expectant blush of mortality.
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Chicago Tribune
It’s his most consistent and rewarding work since “Scary Monsters and Super Creeps” in 1980.
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The Boston Globe
The Next Day offers many sides of a multifaceted artist and almost all of them mesmerizing, as the songs grow richer with each listen.
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NME
It demands that you listen to it in this moment, not that you give it an easy ride because this is the man who made ‘Heroes’; and its songs more than live up to the demand.
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Pretty Much Amazing
The vast majority of The Next Day is vibrant, even delirious, roaring with Bowie’s heaviest rockers and teeming with guitar hooks that just beg to be lovingly re-appropriated by James Murphy.
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BBC
Innovative, dark, bold and creative, it’s an album only David Bowie could make.
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INDEPENDENT
It’s certainly rare to hear a comeback effort that not only reflects an artist’s own best work, but stands alongside it in terms of quality, as The Next Day does.
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billboard
Bowie and producer Tony Visconti, who helped shaped his sound in the 1970s as well as produce seven T. Rex records, have struck gold in creating a work that is modern and well-connected to the artist's fabled sonic-past.
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The Line of Best Fit
The Next Day is very, very good. Purposefully good--the work of someone who seemingly knew that if he was going to come back at all, it had to be with something blessed with brilliance.
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The Quietus
So more than half the album is fantastic, and the rest is very, very strong.
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The Los Angeles Times
With 14 magnetic works, the album is so packed with vivid Bowie-isms that it seems like he's been storing away one plump specimen per year so that in the proverbial wintertime he'd be ready for a glorious feast.
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paste
The Next Day offers an embarrassment of riches that should keep listeners busy for weeks and months to come.
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Under The Radar
Though it's been 10 years since his previous release, The Next Day is Bowie's most consistent record in twice as much time.
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Record Collector
A vintage Bowie album for vintage Bowie people, of whom there are many; a reflection on his own journey and also on ours.
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Blult
The Next Day is complex, pissed off and crafty.
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Coke Machine Glow
You can’t really blame Bowie for conforming to 21st-century quality control when it comes to the sound and scope of this record, but it’s not exactly something to be celebrated either. What deserves celebration, or at least indulgence, are the glimpses of sublime execution on The Next Day, as well as Bowie’s skill in maintaining his mystique after all this time.
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punknews.org
It is a welcome, surprising return to form.
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Beats Per Minute
There’s a confidence exhibited here that’s refreshing.
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NO ripcord
The Next Day is the best Bowie album in 33 years, but it’s perfectly reasonable to not even call it a top 10 Bowie album.
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Drowned in Sound
There are no duds here, though Bowie definitely misses the hipster mark on occasion.
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CLASH
This is a contemplative, confident record which will only strengthen with further listening.
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INDEPENDENT
David Bowie's perpetual predicament is that he can't escape David Bowie's past. In that respect, he's just like the rest of us: we can't escape David Bowie's past either. The Next Day leaves you wondering why you'd ever want to.
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Entertainment
A few tracks lack clear antecedents (see: the Jack White-aping “You Will Set the World on Fire”), and some simply lack cohesion, or at least enough melody to anchor them. But Day is also an excellent reminder that Ziggy Stardust, the Thin White Duke, and the lunatic who sang Christmas songs with Bing Crosby have all been coexisting in the same brain for decades.
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ALL MUSIC
The Next Day neither enhances nor diminishes anything that came before, it's merely a sweet coda to a towering career.
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American Songwriter
The bottom line is that The Next Day proves that Bowie, whoever he might be, is back, invigorating his listeners even as he stupefies them.
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The Austin chronicle
His innovative days may be long behind him, but Bowie's melodic gifts remain undiminished and his lyrics appropriately ambiguous.
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NOW
Pop music is never a purely cerebral exercise, and despite its intriguing concept, The Next Day is woefully short on anything to sing along to.
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exclaim!
The Next Day is a good latter-day Bowie record, worthy of at least a few listens, but since it's so evocative of his earlier, better work there's little reason not to put on Scary Monsters or Heroes instead.
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The Observer
A dense, angry, complex rock album.
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popMATTERS
Put quite simply The Next Day is dull.
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SPIN
The collision of rhetoric and intentions result in both colorless abstractions like piano ballad and first single "Where Are We Now," and grand melodrama like "You Feel So Lonely You Could Die."
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SLATE
David Bowie’s excellent new album is a return to his high ’70s form without being a retread.
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Adrian Denning
it's utterly brilliant, yet a lot of what else else on the record is lively and yes, actually swinging.
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Esquire
The Next Day finds Bowie once again twisting rock and roll into strange new shapes that have more in common with modern art than Chuck Berry.
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the current
There is something on The Next Day for everyone, from Ziggy, Heroes and Lodger Bowie fans.
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sputnik music
The Next Day acts as a rock album, as much as that word can have descriptive meaning in this era – not to speak of emotions, instead a loudness and aggressive intent – but between his roaring music, we see Bowie cracking under pressure, often anxious and otherwise wearily accepting.
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Grateful Web
If we take The Next Day as it is, it’s a good album, and absolutely worth a listen just to hear what Bowie has going on in his mind at the moment. Give it some time, and it may become one of your favorites for the year. Or it may be forgotten in a few months.
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musicOMH
This is the sound of a man reborn, sounding urgent, vital and full of life – and while there are plenty of nods back to previous Bowie eras throughout the record, both musically and lyrically, the overwhelming sense is one of an artist moving forward, embracing everything that’s made him so iconic to create an album that stands up there with his best.
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Daily News
The album strikes a tone that's consistently tense, dense and dire. It's filled with askew guitars, jerkying rhythms and flatulent saxes. It's Germanically harsh.
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Financial Times
After a 10-year silence Bowie is back with an album that’s thick with visions of aging, death and violence.
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Daily Bruin
“The Next Day” gives the world all the youth he has left. This leaves one last mission: to confront this exhausting, caged-in reality. And the next one. And another one.
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Edmonton Journal
The Next Day, a tantalizing album about art, aging, loneliness and identity — with references to his ’70s Berlin era, his spaceman songs and, perhaps, his current status as a happily married man and father in New York.
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Analog Planet
Highly recommended to all but especially Bowie fans who have lost their way.
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SLUG Magazine
The Next Day meets the high expectations that Bowie sets by being, well, Bowie.
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The Scotsman
This may just be the winning frisson that Bowie and Visconti happen to create when they hit a studio but they certainly know which buttons to push in order to trigger that intrinsic Bowie bliss and speak to the fans in familiar yet inventive tones.
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METRO
The sudden comeback of David Bowie, following January’s ‘surprise’ single, Where Are We Now?, has felt both reassuring and radical – like some gentlemanly assault on the digital age.
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Daily Star
THE year’s most talked-about comeback lives up to the hype.
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The Record
Unlike many legendary artists who have made comebacks in the past, Bowie neither leans heavily on his past success nor dramatically changes his sound upon his return. Instead, "The Next Day" satisfies fans by blending new and the familiar.
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MUSIC TAP
The Next Day is infinitely more than a contrived comeback. None of Bowie’s mid-‘70s contemporaries has crafted anything as inspired in the better part of three decades. As for the music itself…it is sorely tempting to simply exclaim, “IT’S DAVID BOWIE! BUY THE DAMN THING AND THANK ME LATER!!” But I owe you (and the music) much more than simplistic, passionate praise.
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Bearded Gentlemen Music
Thus the question will never stop being asked: is this album his best since Scary Monsters? And the answer will always be the same. Does it matter?
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God is in the TV
It’s the sound of an artist aware of the influence he has had over the years, and ‘The Next Day’ brilliantly represents the way that his past haunts the present.
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nzherald.co.nz
He's serious, angry, reflective, strident and not going gentle into that good night of a long retirement. In fact, aside from Where Are We Now? (a desperate grip on this fleeting moment with "as long as there's sun/rain/fire/me/you ...") he's raging against death and life with a rare and difficult passion.
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ANHEDONIC HEADPHONES
The Next Day is not a groundbreaking album, nor is it an urgent album. Even though it is flawed at times, it is solid from start to finish, and an artist like David Bowie certainly didn’t need to make a “comeback” record.
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MIMO
Bottom line—with The Next Day, David Bowie comes across not as someone who is “back”, but as someone who never left. Rife with emotion and creative diversity, this record can easily stand with any of his other master works, and likely will. Here’s to a new chapter for a great artist who is not just “not quite dying,” but obviously is very much alive.
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the pop break
It is an album only David Bowie could have made. You don’t have to be a David Bowie fan to enjoy it in all its dark beauty, but knowing who Bowie once was makes the experience of listening to The Next Day even more enjoyable.
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Revolutions Per Minute
Bowie has crafted a mature (if often macabre) meditation on stardom and mortality that will reward the listener who’s willing to spend time with it.
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Culture Blues
I hope The Next Day is the fuel his passion needs to never fade, and that the internet will never be right about his demise.
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Audiocracy
The Next Day has a vibe & aura all its own, and amazingly Bowie’s voice is as powerful as it’s ever been.
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MTSU Sidelines
Thankfully, the rest of the album is classic Bowie and pushes the boundaries to give us something fresh to overanalyze for years to come. With The Next Day, Bowie reassures doubters that he still takes his music seriously and isn’t phoning it in during his twilight years.
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EXPRESS
The Next Day is contemplative, erudite, melodious, sometimes depressing but never drivingly maudlin and (a relief!) triumphantly good, if not at the level of his youthful genius.
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USA TODAY
Returning after a 10-year absence that sparked rumors of retirement and illness, the rock chameleon delivers a four-star masterwork of beauty and complexity.
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HEAVY AND WEIRD
Each song is carefully crafted. Every little subtle piece of sound is placed perfectly and there is never one point where I lose interest.
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Wales Art Review
The music on the new album is certainly career reflective but in such a joyous way that even its more questionable nature seems like genius.
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Mirror
From the charged chaotic bustle of its opening track, The Next Day is the sound of a man fully engaged and energised by life and his own musical past
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Mark My Words
“The Next Day” is a great album, brimming full of ideas from a master rock musician. Bowie has long been a superlative singer, songwriter, and performer, and on “The Next Day” he shows that he’s ready to create great songs once again
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TREBLE
The buzz surrounding the album is that it’s Bowie’s best since Scary Monsters, and that’s not wrong.
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NOTED
David Bowie’s first album in a decade finds him referencing past selves, taking out old voices like clothes from a wardrobe.
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Gerry Leonard
both immediately rewarding and mystifyingly opaque.
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the charlatan
The Next Day is a wonderful addition to David Bowie’s extensive back catalogue, and a very praiseworthy comeback, indeed.
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