Just days after dropping the second taste from his first new studio album in ten years with the Tilda Swinton-starring video for ‘The Stars (Are Out Tonight)’, which in followed Bowie’s surprise 66th birthday present of releasing lead single ‘Where Are We Now?’ in January, the music icon has another stunning treat for music lovers anticipating his 24th studio album, The Next Day.
Partnering with iTunes, the entire 55min record is available to stream for free in full on Apple’s digital store. You’ve every reason to stop reading and head straight to the image below to begin listening.
(Still here? Well, you’re mad, but we’ll continue.)The surprise announcement that The Next Day is available to listen to in full on iTunes – for a limited time – follows a series of shock announcements from the 66-year old music veteran. Not least the fact that he’d managed to elude the music media entirely in working on his new record with producer Tony Visconti and a cast of close musician friends for two years and keeping it an industry secret.
Then, seemingly out of nowhere, Bowie dropped the first sign of his first new material in a decade with the release of the sombre, reflective ‘Where Are We Now?’ on the British legend’s 66th Birthday on January 9th.
The song was accompanied by an eerie video directed by Tony Oursler that referred to Bowie’s past – showing old stock footage of the Auto Parts shop that the singer used to live above in his ‘Berlin period’.The surprise announcement that The Next Day is available to listen to in full on iTunes – for a limited time – follows a series of shock announcements from the 66-year old music veteran.
The nostalgic referencing continued in the video for ‘The Stars (Are Out Tonight)’ in which Bowie and Tilda Swinton play an old, gentrified couple whose lives are disrupted by the appearance of a celebrity stalking couple that move into the neighbourhood, complete with a young, androgynous model mimicking the look and mood of the ‘Thin White Duke’ character of Bowie’s Station To Station 70s era.
The cover art for The Next Day further deepens the connections to the past, with a boldly amateur re-stamp of the cover of Bowie’s 1977 masterpiece, “Heroes”.
Now that listeners can experience the album in full, we can see just how deep the cross-referencing goes, and if comments from long-time producer and collaborator Tony Visconti are anything to go by, they’ll run deep indeed.
“The subject matter he choses to write about is amazing,” Visconti told press in revealing the secret to how Bowie was working on a new album for two years without the wider media’s knowledge; ”the album’s got a lot of substance. You’re going to have to listen to it many times, because the lyrical content’s going to take a long time to absorb,” Visconti said.
Well for a limited time ahead of the album’s official release through Sony on March 8th, we can.
Click the image below to listen to David Bowie’s The Next Day.
