It was 2012, the drive home from college was five hours, and I was still using a CD player. I burned The Rise and Fall of Ziggy Stardust and the Spiders from Mars to disc and got sucked in, listening to it on repeat over and over and over again as I drove. I’m sure I picked it out because Bowie was a canonical artist I’d never heard, because the album was on some greatest records of all time list, something like that. It doesn’t matter, really. I got sucked into the record. It might have stopped there, but then David Bowie came back.

By 2013, David Bowie had been out of the spotlight for nearly a decade. He had a heart attack on stage while touring in support of 2003’s Reality. He flirted with a comeback after recovery, singing with Arcade Fire and appearing on the odd record or in the odd film, but he never really returned to public life. And then he did.

The Next Day, which Bowie released just about out of nowhere in 2013, will be ten years old in just a few weeks. Ten! I have trouble believing that. I still feel a little awe when I start the record, a little surprise that it exists at all. The record hooked me hard, sent me down the rabbit hole through Bowie’s whole discography, unlocked a whole world of music from Scott Walker to Kate Bush, and helped me find Chris O’Leary’s incredible blog Pushing Ahead of the Dame. The campy grandeur of The Next Day was exactly what I needed in 2013 and I still love it in 2023.

The music doesn’t sound revolutionary. It didn’t ten years ago, either. The Next Day is David Bowie getting his band back together, pulling together the musicians he had recorded and toured with through the latter half of the ‘90s and into the ’00s, finally giving Reality the sequel he had teased a few times over the years. The Next Day is better than Reality and better than 2001’s Heathen, too. Those records have some wonderful songs on them, but they lack a real spark. They devote too much time to Bowie’s Grand Old Man act. The Next Day shifts the balance a little, to great effect.

“Where Are We Now?” (the surprise first single, dropped out of nowhere in January 2013) is all Grand Old Man. Bowie sounds tired and nostalgic, speaking to his audience and wandering through his memories of Berlin and the Berlin he imagined in the ‘70s, the world of Christopher Isherwood and Cabaret. Guitarist Gerry Leonard turns in a wonderful, shimmering guitar solo. All of it is beautiful, none of it quite matches the rest of The Next Day.

The rest of the record is fiery. The title track rips, Bowie all piss and vinegar. “If You Can See Me” nods to his ‘90s drum ’n bass experiments. “How Does The Grass Grow?” interpolates Jerry Lordan’s “Apache” and has some real bite to it — “how does the grass grow? blood! blood! blood!”

Those lyrics are indicative of the record as whole, too. Blood, death, and pain reverberate across the album. Stars become vampires, boys shoot up schools, bodies rot, young men are marched off to slaughter in battle. The violence is explicit in way it that startles. On its surface, The Next Day is frequently beautiful. Bowie sounds revitalized, sure, but not at the expense of melody. Many of the tracks are wonderfully layered as well, with acoustic guitars, horns, or strings adding detail. Look past the musical beauty, though, and the lyrics poke and disturb. Blood. Blood. Blood.

In the wake of Bowie’s 2016 death and the release of Blackstar, The Next Day has lost a bit of its pride of place in the David Bowie discography. Blackstar is a better farewell, an album that feels more like A Statement than The Next Day ever did or could. The Next Day isn’t perfect. It isn’t formally daring. There are stabs at ambition (“Heat” in particular, Scott Walker mode back again), but many of the songs are just solid rock songs. Nothing gets weird, the music doesn’t jar too much, but there aren’t any real misfires either. There are nods to past glories, with drums pulled in from Ziggy Stardust and voices lifted from across Bowie’s career. That doesn’t make the album any less great. It’s no Blackstar, it’s no Ziggy Stardust, but it is still the thing I loved and needed ten years ago. Happy birthday, beautiful. You did good.