It is an enormous pleasure to report that the new David Bowie album is an absolute wonder: urgent, sharp-edged, bold, beautiful and baffling, an intellectually stimulating, emotionally charged, musically jagged, electric bolt through his own mythos and the mixed-up, celebrity-obsessed, war-torn world of the 21st century. 
 
 Musically, it is stripped and to the point, painted in the primal colours of rock : hard drums, fluid bass, fizzing guitars, shaded by splashes of keyboard and dirty rasps of horns. The 14 songs are short and spiky, often contrasting that kind of patent Bowie one-note declarative drawl with sweet bursts of melodic escape that hit you like a sugar rush. Bowie’s return from a decade’s absence feels very present, although full of sneaky backward glances. 
 
 Hints, references and echoes of the past abound. Touches of jangling Sixties pop lift the flying melody of I’d Rather Be High, the poised soul of the Thin White Duke haunts the sax strut of Dirty Boys and Boss of Me, and epic Eighties Goth rears its imperious head amid the dramatic descending chords of Love Is Lost. 
 
 You might detect the wonky sound-clashes of Berlin-era Bowie in the dissonant chords of Dancing Out In Space, albeit crossed with the dynamic grooves of Let’s Dance, opening out to the drum’n’bass jazz fusion of Earthling on If You Can See Me. 
 
 There’s a surprising blast of the heavy rocking excess of Tin Machine on the power-chord stomp of (You Will Set) The World On Fire and even a welcome dash of Ziggy Stardust about the glam-rocking Valentine’s Day, which spirals off towards the heavens with Earl Slick’s guitar solo pursuing the elusive spirit of the late Mick Ronson. 
 
 Yet The Next Day never feels like a museum piece, deftly filtering signature references through a lean, snappy New York rock distortion that is something quite new for Bowie. Discounting the failed experiment of Tin Machine, this is his rockiest album since the days of Aladdin Sane. 
 
 The Next Day was produced secretly over two years with long-serving collaborator Tony Visconti and a small unit of session players familiar from late-period Bowie, including bassist Gail Ann Dorsey, drummer Zachary Alford and Irish ambient guitarist Gerry Leonard, with Bowie on keyboards. 
 
 
 
 David Bowie - Where Are We Now? on MUZU.TV. 
 
 
 
 The title track opens with a snare slam and see-saw guitar riff appropriated from Fashion but ramped up with a Sonic Youth attack. Imagistic lyrics conjure a fallen idol betrayed and punished by “the gormless and baying crowd” who “can’t get enough of that doomsday song”. “Here I am, not quite dying,” chants Bowie, while his band punch and howl. 
 
 Here he is, indeed. With its dense, oblique imagery, “soggy paper bodies” and “purple-headed priest”, it could (as producer Visconti has suggested) be about some obscure medieval tyrant, but it could equally be a comment on the fickleness and dangers of the fame from which Bowie retreated. “At first they give you everything that you want,” Bowie snaps, “then they take back everything that you need.” 
 
 Stars are a repeated, ambiguous motif, sometimes appearing as celestial bodies, sometimes in the back of stretch limos with tinted windows. 
 
 “Brigitte, Jack, Kate and Brad” have a playful cameo on The Stars (Are Out Tonight), in which Bowie recasts celebrities as tragic minor gods of a secular age, “sexless and unaroused”. With his cut-and-paste methodology, Bowie is never easy to interpret, but his new album bubbles and fizzes with lyrical energy, panning out from intensely personal close-ups to horrified widescreen shots of a chaotic world. 
 
 
 
 David Bowie - The Stars (Are Out Tonight) on MUZU.TV. Warning: contains scenes of nudity 
 
 On the extraordinary How Does The Grass Grow he contemplates ethnic genocide with a nightmarish despair made all the more disorienting by the off-kilter exuberance of a “la la la” chorus appropriated from The Shadows’ Apache. 
 
 The album’s epic climax, You Feel So Lonely You Could Die, is fantastic, a lush companion piece to Ziggy’s Rock’n’roll Suicide that drips vitriol in place of compassion (“Oblivion shall own you / Death alone shall love you”), the warmth of the setting contrasting with the cold rage of the sentiment. 
 
 It feels highly personal but lends itself to political interpretation, an attack on shadowy figures who engineer conflict, the power behind the power. But why does Bowie shift gear at the end to ride out on the stately, resonant drum pattern of Ziggy’s Five Years? 
 
 What can it all mean? Who knows? I’m still scratching my head over an album cover that looks as if he just stuck a Post-it note on Heroes. You don’t come to Bowie for easy answers, and The Next Day is both immediately rewarding and mystifyingly opaque. It closes on the ominous, despairing, jazzily introspective Heat, with the tremulous refrain “And I tell myself, I don’t know who I am.” 
 
 Bowie provides his own tantalising answer to the ultimate question of his chameleonic identity by signing off from the most compelling comeback in rock history with “I am a seer… but I am a liar.” 
 
 Welcome back, David. 
 
 The Next Day is released on Sony on March 11 
 
 Follow Telegraph Music on Twitter ||||| When David Bowie chose to break a decade's silence by releasing a single, Where Are We Now?, on his 66th birthday, dissenting voices were hard to find amid the clamour made by people eager to welcome him back. Some argued that the clamour was part of the problem: it drowned out the music, which perhaps wasn't worthy of the noisy excitement it had caused. The reason people were so thrilled Bowie was back, they suggested, was founded in the music he made in the 1970s, a decade when almost every new album he released was an astonishingly sure-footed leap forward into uncharted territory. But Where Are We Now? was no Heroes or Sound and Vision. Rather, it was a charming, fragile ballad. Indeed, it was not unlike the stuff he had been knocking out immediately before his retirement, when – presumably burned by the mixed response to his spirited 1990s attempts to seize the zeitgeist or dabble in the avant garde in the way he'd done so effortlessly two decades previously – Bowie settled on a more straightforward and comfortable kind of classicism. Had Where Are We Now? been released in 2004, they suggested, its reception would have been far more muted. People were welcoming back an exhilarating, distant memory of Bowie, rather than the reality. 
 
 They had a point, but Where Are We Now? still carried with it some intriguing possibilities for the subsequent album. The song found Bowie drifting nostalgically around his former adopted hometown, Berlin, suggesting that The Next Day might be that rarest of things, an autobiographical work from an artist whose nakedly autobiographical songs can be numbered on the fingers of one hand. Such speculation was bolstered by the self-referential artwork of both the single and album: the former offering an inverted photo of a skeletal Bowie onstage in 1974, the latter featuring the cover of 1977's Heroes with the title redacted and a white square covering the famous image of the singer in a pose modelled on a painting by Erich Heckel. Perhaps, came the excited suggestion, Bowie had spent the past decade ruminating on his past and was now issuing an album in lieu of a memoir. 
 
 Perhaps not. There are certainly a smattering of knowing sonic references to Bowie's past works. If You Can See Me features the eerie sped-up vocal effect found on 1970's After All and the climax of Hunky Dory's The Bewlay Brothers, while You Feel So Lonely You Could Die ends with a reprise of the drum beat that introduced Five Years, the opening track of The Rise and Fall of Ziggy Stardust and the Spiders from Mars. And there are moments when you wonder whether some of the characters in The Next Day's songs aren't founded in personal experience: certainly, the protagonist of Love Is Lost – appointed "the voice of youth", marooned abroad, cosseted by luxury but fearful and paranoid, "thinking like mad" – feels remarkably like a pen portrait of the poor, cocaine-ravaged soul in that inverted photo. But elsewhere The Next Day offers what you might call an index of Bowiean obsessions. 
 
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 In the first 10 minutes alone, you get the terror of life in a dystopian dictatorship teetering on the brink of apocalypse; a feral gang of vaguely homoerotic juvenile delinquents smashing things up; the numbing isolation of stardom and the suggestion that stars themselves may actually be some kind of alien lifeforms "soaking up our primitive world". The mutual respect between Bowie and Scott Walker is well-documented – an effusive 50th birthday tribute from the elusive former Scott Engel famously reduced Bowie to tears live on Radio 1 – and it's Walker's latterday work that much of The Next Day resembles, at least in that the lyrics are so dense and allusive you occasionally feel in need of a set of York Notes to get through them. 
 
 The present writer spent an alternately illuminating and rather trying few hours attempting to unpick the lyrics of I'd Rather Be High. Perhaps the mention of "Clare and Lady Manners" drinking and gossiping about politics during wartime was a reference to The Coterie, the 1910s' equivalent of the subsequent decade's bright young things – its male membership ultimately decimated in the trenches – in which Lady Diana Manners played a leading role. Or perhaps it was a reference to Officers and Gentlemen, the second novel in Evelyn Waugh's Sword of Honour trilogy, in which a character based on Lady Diana Cooper (nee Manners) attempts to pull strings for Ivor Clare, a character facing desertion charges. That seems more likely – amid the subsequent lyrical references to the futility of conflict, there's a mention of Egypt, where Officers and Gentlemen is partially set – in which case, the song's overall message might be summarised as: Waugh – huh! – what is it good for? But what does Officers and Gentlemen – or, for that matter, The Coterie – have to do with the opening line's reference to Vladimir Nabokov's life in 1920s and 30s Berlin? Pausing only to wonder whether there's a certain cultural richness here that you just don't find in, say, the oeuvre of the Vaccines, or whether Bowie has earned himself the exalted position where one takes for cultural richness the kind of thing you'd ordinarily dismiss as agonising pretention – and to note that either is deeply impressive – the present writer gave up and decided to just enjoy the music. 
 
 This, it has to be said, is a relative doddle. Producer Tony Visconti has suggested that The Next Day is of a piece with 1979's Lodger and, as on that record, Bowie spends a lot of The Next Day experimenting with his vocal delivery, offering, among other things, a peculiar nasal drone on the title track and a doomy, tortured lowing that recalls Walker – him again – on the closing Heat. The dense web of screaming feedback that ends Where Does the Grass Grow? recalls the climax of Boys Keep Swinging, while the fantastic If You Can See Me has some of the relentless propulsion of Move On, although it's perhaps worth noting that the latter track was about the joyous freedom of travel, while the characters here are unable to escape the shadowy forces controlling their lives however far they run: "if you can see me, I can see you," reiterates the chorus, Big Brother-ishly. That aside, the comparison with Lodger might be pitching it a bit high. It's perhaps the least well-regarded album of original material Bowie released in the 70s, but that tells you more about the astonishing quality of the records that preceded it than it does Lodger itself. If there are some intriguing musical decisions on The Next Day – the honking baritone sax that gives the feral gang of Dirty Boys a curiously lurching, ungainly gait; the vocal rendering of the Shadows' Apache that constitutes Where Does the Grass Grow?'s hook, the ominous, fretless-bass-decorated shudder of Heat – there's none of Lodger's unfettered experimentalism, nothing as authentically bizarre as Yassassin or African Night Flight. 
 
 What The Next Day has that perhaps Lodger didn't is something more prosaic. Whatever else he's been doing, clearly at least some of the last decade has been spent carefully crafting inarguable tunes. Its melody shifting from weary sigh to frantic angst, I'd Rather Be High is utterly beautiful; The Stars (Are Out Tonight) supports its Brad-Pitt-is-an-alien thesis with a fantastic chorus, all the more potent for the fact that it takes an age to arrive; Valentine's Day is so deceptively sweet that the bleakness of its subject matter – another tyrant, bent on crushing the world beneath his heels – doesn't initially register. 
 
 Despite the lyrical density, The Next Day's success rests on simple pleasures, not a phrase you'd ever use to describe Lodger or Station to Station. You could argue that means the naysayers still have a point. For all the pointers it offers in that direction, The Next Day isn't the equal of Bowie's 70s work: but then, the man himself might reasonably argue, what is? Perhaps it's destined to be remembered more for the unexpected manner in which it was announced than its contents. That doesn't seem a fair fate for an album that's thought-provoking, strange and filled with great songs. Listening to The Next Day makes you hope it's not a one-off, that his return continues apace: no mean feat, given that listening to a new album by most of his peers makes you wish they'd stick to playing the greatest hits. 
 
 • The Next Day is released on 11 March ||||| One thing that struck reviewers who were grappling with Blackstar, David Bowie’s final album, was how tricky it was to interpret lyrically. Kitty Empire, writing in the Observer, described it as elliptical, while the Guardian’s Alexis Petridis wrote that the album “seems to offer those attempting to unravel his lyrics a wry ‘best of luck with that’”. 
 
 David Bowie's life and career – in pictures Read more 
 
 What the critics didn’t know, however, was that the man behind it had been diagnosed with cancer 18 months ago, and that he knew his life was coming to an end. If this had been common knowledge, they would all no doubt have looked at Blackstar in a different light. Was David Bowie saying goodbye on it? And does it seem obvious now that he has died? 
 
 I Can’t Give Everything Away, the album’s final track, is perhaps the most potent song to re-examine. “I know something is very wrong,” he begins, then sings: “The blackout hearts, the flowered news / With skull designs upon my shoes.” The sense that Bowie has an unhappy secret he desperately wishes he could share is reaffirmed in the chorus: “I can’t give everything away.” 
 
 
 
 On Dollar Days, Bowie could be singing about an afterlife, or some kind of spiritual connection to his homeland: “If I’ll never see the English evergreens I’m running to, it’s nothing to me.” The songs Tis a Pity She Was a Whore and Sue (Or in a Season of Crime) may be based around a 17th-century John Ford play, but it’s interesting to think about why this appealed to Bowie. The latter song contains lines such as “The clinic called, the x-ray’s fine, I brought you home,” as well as references to tombstones and death. 
 
 
 
 Before the album was released there was much talk about how the title track was inspired by the Islamic State – a fair enough assessment given the references to “executions” and the fact that Donny McCaslin, the jazz musician who helped shape Blackstar’s sound, had hinted as much in an interview. But this also has allusions to saviour myths and what we leave behind when we’re gone. “I’m not a pop star,” sings Bowie at one point. “I’m a blackstar.” It seems to set out his desire to be regarded as something beyond just a flash-in-the-pan fad, as Martin Amis wrong-headedly suggested Bowie was in a 1973 New Statesman piece. The album’s cover art, a solitary black star, was the first Bowie release that did not feature his image, and it seems to complete this symbolic journey from one world to another. 
 
 And then there’s Lazarus, Blackstar’s second and most recent single. Revisiting it, in the wake of the sad news, it seems to be another explicit farewell song: “Look up here,” he begins, “I’m in heaven.” What a staggering first line for someone who knew their time was coming to an end to write: to know that he would soon be singing it to his fans from beyond the grave. 
 
 The last line – “Oh, I’ll be free / Just like that bluebird / Oh, I’ll be free / Ain’t that just like me” – also seems explicit, viewing death in a positive light, as a release from his illness. (This reminded me of Charles Bukowski’s poem Bluebird, which also used the bird as a symbol for captivity and release.) 
 
 The song is, of course, named after Lazarus of Bethany, whom Jesus brings back from the dead in the Gospel of John. It’s easy to see why Bowie would be fascinated by the idea of cheating mortality. On Dollar Days, he could even be referencing it when he sings: “I’m dying to push their backs against the grain / And fool them all again and again.” 
 
 It is something Bowie’s fans seemed to have also considered. There’s been an outpouring of shock and surprise at his death, not because, at 69, he was relatively young, but because people seemed to ascribe higher powers to him. As if this pop genius would have somehow twigged a way of escaping death. As if we would somehow still be hearing Bowie albums, beamed in via holographic afterlife, in 3016. 
 
 If that was one trick even he couldn’t pull off, then we can be sure of something: as Bowie’s influence stretches far and wide, seeping into the work of those whose lives he touched, we will get to see him reborn countless times over the coming decades.
– David Bowie's latest album—marking his return after a decade—seems to be living up to the anticipation. Sure, it's not 1970s Bowie, but critics are loving the 66-year-old's The Next Day: It "may be the greatest comeback album ever," writes Andy Gill in a five-star Independent review. "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." In the Telegraph, which also gives the album five stars, Neil McCormick can't restrain himself: It's "an absolute wonder: urgent, sharp-edged, bold, beautiful, and baffling, an intellectually stimulating, emotionally charged, musically jagged, electric bolt through his own mythos and the mixed-up, celebrity-obsessed, war-torn world of the 21st century." If that weren't enough, The Next Day is "thought-provoking, strange, and filled with great songs," writes Alexis Petridis in the Guardian. Full of "inarguable tunes," the album's "success rests on simple pleasures"—though the lyrics are "so dense and allusive" you may wish you had Cliffs Notes. "It’s not Diamond Dogs or Young Americans or Low—get real, this isn’t the seventies," writes Chris Roberts at the Quietus. Still, "it’s not just good, it’s great."