The sessions featured players from Rodgers' band Chic and the then-unknown Texas blues guitarist Stevie Ray Vaughan on lead guitar.

[1] Following the sessions, Bowie portrayed the lead role of Joseph "John" Merrick in the Broadway play The Elephant Man between late July 1980 and early January 1981.

[4] The murder of John Lennon in December 1980 affected Bowie deeply;[a] he cancelled an upcoming Scary Monsters tour and withdrew to his home in Switzerland, becoming a recluse but continuing to work.

[14] Having grown increasingly dissatisfied with the label, who he felt was "milking" his back catalogue,[13] he was also eager for the September 1982 expiration of his 1975 severance settlement with his old manager Tony Defries.

[16] According to biographer Nicholas Pegg, contemporary listeners considered Rodgers' writing and production work, including Sister Sledge's "We Are Family" (1979) and Diana Ross's "Upside Down" (1980),[17] to be "dance classics".

The producer also recruited his regular Chic collaborators: keyboardist Robert Sabino, percussionist Sammy Figueroa and backing vocalists Frank and George Simms.

[29] In the biography Strange Fascination, Buckley found Vaughan to be a "bizarre" choice for lead guitarist, as at the time, he was "about as far away from Robert Fripp and Adrian Belew as you could get".

[13][25] After the sessions concluded, Bowie went on holiday in Mexico,[d] before returning to New York to finish post-production work and close his deal with EMI America at the end of January 1983.

[40] The artist Tanja Stark sees the commercial tempo of the album masking the lyrical continuity of Bowie's ongoing narratives of spiritual struggle and death anxieties.

[47] Pegg calls Bowie's rendition "a tremendously effective slice of hardcore pop", commenting that the lyrics reflect the album's overarching themes of "cultural identity" and "desperate love".

"[48] It was described by Ed Power in the Irish Examiner as "a decent chunk of funk-rock";[49] Perone finds that it represents the contemporary dance craze of the 1980s.

[21] On the other hand, Ken Tucker of Rolling Stone wrote that "Without You" featured some of the most daring songwriting of Bowie's career and complimented his vocal performance.

[21] Pegg writes that Bowie updated its sound to match Let's Dance, featuring a new wave and pop reggae groove,[33][17] and calls Vaughan's guitar solo his finest on the record.

[17] After delivering the album to the label, Bowie travelled to Australia in February 1983 to film the music videos for the first two singles, "Let's Dance" and "China Girl".

[42][48] The video for "China Girl", again directed by Mallet, is similar in its theme of clashing perspectives, juxtaposing Sydney executives against the city's Chinese population.

[60] Although it failed to replicate the success of the title track, it still peaked at number two on the UK Singles Chart in June, held off the top spot by the Police's "Every Breath You Take".

Like "China Girl", "Modern Love" peaked at number two in the UK, held off the top spot by Culture Club's "Karma Chameleon".

[44] "Without You" appeared as the fourth and final single in November, backed by "Criminal World", released only in Holland, Japan, Spain and the US, where it reached number 73.

[64] Although Aladdin Sane, Pin Ups (both 1973) and Diamond Dogs (1974) were at the top position longer, Let's Dance remained on the chart for over a year.

[13] All of Bowie's albums he released between 1969 and 1974: Space Oddity, The Man Who Sold the World, Hunky Dory, The Rise and Fall of Ziggy Stardust and the Spiders from Mars, Aladdin Sane, Pin Ups and Diamond Dogs, as well as Low and "Heroes" (both 1977), all began to chart again.

[68] Steve Bush of Smash Hits found it overall dull,[67] and Debra Rae Cohen of The New York Times deemed it Bowie's "most artless" record yet, but one whose familiar dance music is "almost timeless in its appeal".

[71] Tucker felt Let's Dance sounded great, with an intelligent simplicity and a "surface beauty", but that as a whole it was "thin and niggling", other than "Modern Love", "Without You" and "Shake It", which offered "some of the most daring songwriting of Bowie's career".

[72] More positively, NME's Charles Shaar Murray gave unanimous praise to the album, calling it "some of the strongest, simplest and least complicated music that Bowie has ever made."

[73] John Walker of Trouser Press hailed it as a record that "simply bleaches the competition", one that represents "the closest Bowie has come to capturing pure energy".

[79] The majority of the Let's Dance musicians returned, with the exception of Vaughan, who was present for rehearsals but let go by Bowie just days before the European leg was scheduled to begin.

[79] Discussing the setlist, Pegg states it was "unashamedly a greatest hits package aimed at acquainting the new mass audience with Bowie's back catalogue".

"[49] Quantick praised the combination of Bowie and Rodgers as "perfect" on the title track, the "sweet, romantic" rendition of "China Girl" and highlighted "Criminal World".

[47] Writing in 1995 for the Spin Alternative Record Guide, Rob Sheffield sees the album as exemplifying the influence of the New Romantic movement on Bowie.

[95] Writing for The Guardian the same year, Jeremy Allen stated that the album had "spent time in the wilderness, rejected by many because of its 80s production values", but he added that "a reappraisal was all but inevitable and has coincided with a renaissance in Rodgers' career and an outpouring of love for the unprecedentedly successful producer/guitarist.

"[96] The chief rock and pop critic of The Guardian, Alexis Petridis, said in his retrospective review of Bowie's career in 2016 that Let's Dance "had its moments", unlike Tonight.