The Belgian artist Guy Peellaert painted the controversial cover artwork depicting Bowie as a half-man, half-dog hybrid, based on photos taken by the photographer Terry O'Neill.

It has received mixed reviews since its release, many criticising its lack of cohesion; Bowie's biographers consider it one of his best works and, in 2013, NME ranked it one of the greatest albums of all time.

According to biographer David Buckley, Scott's departure marked an end to Bowie's "classic 'pop' period" and brought him to more experimental territory and "arguably greater musical daring".

"[2] As Ronson began work on his solo album Slaughter on 10th Avenue, Bowie and his wife Angie moved out of Beckenham's Haddon Hall because of harassment by fans.

He co-produced and played on Lulu's recording of "The Man Who Sold the World", which was released as a single in January 1974,[3][4] contributed to Steeleye Span's Now We Are Six,[2] and formed a trio called the Astronettes, comprising Cherry, Jason Guess and Geoff MacCormack.

[2] This surprised NME critics Roy Carr and Charles Shaar Murray, producing what they described as a "scratchy, raucous, semi-amateurish sound that gave the album much of its characteristic flavour".

[20] The pop culture scholar Shelton Waldrep describes it as "wonderfully dark proto-punk",[21] while the music journalist C. M. Crockford says it is "the goofy, abrasive place where punk and art-rock meet, dance a little, and depart".

The author Peter Doggett notes that unlike the opening of Ziggy Stardust, which announces the world will end in five years, the apocalypse of "Future Legend" could happen at any time.

The track introduces Bowie's newest persona, Halloween Jack, described as "a real cool cat" who "lives on top of Manhattan Chase" in the urban wasteland depicted in "Future Legend".

[26] He rules the "diamond dogs", who O'Leary describes as "packs of feral kids camped on high-rise roofs, tearing around on roller skates, terrorizing the corpse-strewn streets they live above".

[18][31] "Sweet Thing" paints pictures of decay, with sex being a "drug-like commodity" while "Candidate" contains references to Charles Manson and Muhammad Ali, with Bowie being "consumed by the fakery of his own stage creations".

[2][43] According to the record-collector publication Goldmine price guides, these albums have been among the most expensive record collectibles of all time, selling for thousands of US dollars for a single copy.

Subsequent reissues have included a rejected inner gatefold image featuring Bowie in a sombrero cordobés holding onto a ravenous dog with a copy of Walter Ross's novel The Immortal at his feet.

[53][54] A $400,000 advertising campaign featuring billboards in Times Square and Sunset Boulevard, magazine ads, subway posters declaring "The Year of the Diamond Dogs" and a television commercial, one of the first of its kind for a pop album according to Pegg, boosted its sales in the US.

Fritz Lang's Metropolis (1927) and Robert Wiene's The Cabinet of Dr. Caligari (1920) influenced the tour's design, primarily due to Bowie's interest in German expressionism.

The shows were altered heavily, and no longer featured elaborate set-pieces, partly because Bowie had tired of the design and wanted to explore the new sound he was creating.

[61] Broadcast on BBC1 in the UK on 26 January 1975, Cracked Actor is notable as a primary source of footage of the Diamond Dogs Tour, and for showing Bowie's declining mental state during this period because of his growing cocaine addiction.

[2] Martin Kirkup of Sounds wrote, "where Aladdin Sane seemed like a series of Instamatic snapshots taken from weird angles, Diamond Dogs has the provoking quality of a thought-out painting that draws on all the deeper colors".

He also dismissed the lyrical content as "escapist pessimism concocted from a pleasure dome: eat, snort and bugger little girls, for tomorrow we shall be peoploids – but tonight how about $6.98 for this piece of plastic?

[74] Diamond Dogs' raw guitar style and visions of urban chaos, scavenging children and nihilistic lovers ("We'll buy some drugs and watch a band / Then jump in a river holding hands") have been credited with anticipating the punk revolution that would take place in the following years.

[13] According to the Rolling Stone writer Mark Kemp, the album's "resigned nihilism inspired interesting gloom and doom from later goth and industrial acts such as Bauhaus and Nine Inch Nails".

AllMusic's Stephen Thomas Erlewine said that, because Bowie did not completely retire the character of Ziggy Stardust, Diamond Dogs suffers from him being unsure how to move forward.

Despite the album's commercial success, Rivadavia concluded: "with decades of hindsight, Diamond Dogs now seems more like the gateway from the Ziggy Stardust era to his Thin White Duke blue-eyed soul period, and beyond".

Pitchfork's Barry Walters described the album as "a bummer, a bad trip, 'No Fun' – a sustained work of decadence and dread that transforms corrosion into celebration".

[25] For punknews.org, C. M. Crockford wrote that Diamonds Dogs is Bowie's "utterly most distinctive work: melodramatic, raw, challenging, and ambitious even when crammed with catchy songs".

"[43] Although Spitz calls it "no fun", he states it was Bowie's "best-sounding, most complex record to date, and it still pulls you into its romantic and doomed world three and a half decades on".

[18] Trynka calls it "a beautiful mess",[87] while Buckley says the album proved that Bowie could still produce work of "real quality" without Scott or the Spiders.

[27] Pegg writes that with tracks like "We Are the Dead", "Big Brother" and the "Sweet Thing" suite, the album contains "some of the most sublime and remarkable sounds in the annals of rock music".

He further states that Bowie's new voice on the record, a "basso profundo", particularly evident on "Sweet Thing" and "Big Brother", was a major influence on gothic rock bands in the 1980s.

Although the original 1974 vinyl releases featured a gatefold cover,[93] some later LP versions such as RCA's 1980 US reissue presented the album in a standard non-gatefold sleeve.