Aladdin Sane is the sixth studio album by the English musician David Bowie, released in the United Kingdom on 19 April 1973 through RCA Records.

The lyrics reflect the pros of Bowie's newfound stardom and the cons of touring and contain images of urban decay, drugs, sex, violence and death.

[1] David Bowie launched to stardom in early July 1972 through the release of his fifth studio album The Rise and Fall of Ziggy Stardust and the Spiders from Mars and his performance of "Starman" on BBC's Top of the Pops.

[7] The tour, combined with other side projects during the period, such as co-producing Lou Reed's Transformer and mixing the Stooges' Raw Power,[8][9] took a toll on Bowie's mental health, further influencing his writing.

[5] The pianist came from a jazz and blues background, which the biographer Nicholas Pegg believes veered the album from pure rock 'n' roll and expanded Bowie's experimental horizons.

[1] Other musicians hired for the album and tour included the saxophonists Ken Fordham and Brian Wilshaw; the singers Juanita Franklin and Linda Lewis as backing vocalists; and longtime friend Geoffrey MacCormack (later known as Warren Peace), who subsequently appeared on later Bowie records in the 1970s.

[1] The first song recorded for the album was "The Jean Genie" on 6 October 1972 at RCA Studios in New York City, after which the band and crew continued the tour in Chicago.

He says that some themes present on Bowie's previous works also appear in Aladdin Sane, including "notions of religion shattered by science, extraterrestrial encounters posing as messianic visitations, the impact on society of different kinds of 'star' and the degradation of human life in a spiritual void.

"[1] The author James E. Perone states that thematically, the album deals with "the concept and definition of sanity",[27] while Ric Albano of Classic Rock Review wrote that the music reflects the pros of newfound stardom and the cons of the perils of touring.

[16][29] Pegg describes "Watch That Man" as "a sleazy garage rocker" heavily influenced by the Rolling Stones, specifically their song "Brown Sugar" (1971).

[37] The lyrics are dark, featuring images of urban decay, violence, drugs, emotional isolation and suicide,[36] adding to the album's overarching theme of alienation.

[22][44] The subsequent rerecording on Aladdin Sane was glam-influenced, and featured Marc Bolan's original guitar part mimicked almost note-for-note by Ronson.

"[27] The lyrics were also an ode to Iggy Pop, Bowie calling the song's character a "white-trash, kind of trailer-park kid thing – the closet intellectual who wouldn't want the world to know that he reads".

[16] Unlike other tracks on the album, "Lady Grinning Soul" has a sexual ambiance, lushness and serenity, and features flamenco-style guitar from Ronson and a Latin-style piano part from Garson.

When writing the album during the tour, it was under the working title Love Aladdin Vein, which Bowie said at the time felt right, but decided to change it partly due to its drug connotations.

[54] The cover artwork features a shirtless Bowie with red hair and a red-and-blue lightning bolt splitting his face in two while a teardrop runs down his collarbone.

[f][41][54] In an effort to ensure RCA promoted the album extensively, Bowie's manager Tony Defries was determined to make the cover as costly as possible.

[41] Henry Edwards of The New York Times initially described the image as "the most cunning representation to date of this angel-faced, 25-year-old, English composer-performer as a disembodied spirit of the Space Age".

[54] Ben Gerson of Rolling Stone remarked on "Bowie's provocative melodies, audacious lyrics, masterful arrangements (with Mick Ronson) and production (with Ken Scott)", and pronounced it "less manic than The Man Who Sold The World, and less intimate than Hunky Dory, with none of its attacks of self-doubt.

[84] Writer Charles Shaar Murray of the NME felt Aladdin Sane was a strong contender for album of the year, further calling it "a worthy contribution to the most important body of musical work produced in this decade".

[85] The Village Voice critic Robert Christgau wrote a few years later that his favorite Bowie album had been Aladdin Sane, "the fragmented, rather second-hand collection of elegant hard rock songs (plus one Jacques Brel-style clinker) that fell between the Ziggy Stardust and Diamond Dogs concepts.

The UK leg made small setlist changes and introduced backdrop banners containing the blue and red lightning bolt Bowie donned on the Aladdin Sane cover artwork.

[25] While he praised the album for presenting unusual genres and being lyrically different, he criticised Bowie's cover of the Rolling Stones' "Let's Spend the Night Together", calling it "oddly clueless", and contended that "there's no distinctive sound or theme to make [a cohesive record]; it's Bowie riding the wake of Ziggy Stardust, which means there's a wealth of classic material here, but not enough focus to make the album itself a classic".

[25] Pitchfork's Douglas Wolk also found it too similar to its predecessor, calling it "effectively Ziggy Stardust II, a harder-rocking if less original variation on the hit album".

[101] He writes that while Ziggy Stardust ended with a "vision of outreach to the front row" in the lyrics of "Rock 'n' Roll Suicide", Aladdin Sane is "all alienation and self-conscious artifice, parodic gestures of intimacy directed to the theater balcony".

[107] Biographer Paul Trynka describes it as both "slicker and sketchier" than Ziggy, and argues that "[it] is in some ways a more convincing document on the nature of fame and show business than [its predecessor]".

[110] Perone finds the record not as accessible as its predecessor, deducing that with less "melodic and harmonic hooks" and lyrics that are "darker and more inwardly focused and analytical", the result is an album that is "not as well remembered" as Ziggy.

Although the original 1973 vinyl release featured a gatefold cover, some later LP versions such as RCA's 1980 US reissue presented the album in a standard non-gatefold sleeve.

[117] In 1990, Dr. Toby Mountain at Northeastern Digital, Southborough, Massachusetts,[118] remastered Aladdin Sane from the original master tapes for Rykodisc, released with no bonus tracks.

[121] The second in a series of 30th Anniversary 2CD Edition sets (along with Ziggy Stardust and Diamond Dogs), this release includes a remastered version of the album on the first disc.