Influenced by the television series Twin Peaks, the nonlinear narrative of Outside concerns the residents of the fictional Oxford Town, New Jersey, and follows the detective Nathan Adler as he investigates the murder of a 14-year-old girl.

[4] Looking for inspiration, the pair visited the Gugging psychiatric hospital near Vienna, Austria, in January 1994, which contained a wing whose patients were well-known for their "outsider art".

Regarding the concept of death as art, Bowie told Vox magazine:[13] Apart from this unhealthy, almost obsessive interest in ritualistic artists, [...] [Outside] also has some sort of a feeling of this new paganism that seems to be springing up with the advent of scarifications, piercings, tribalisms, tattoos and whatever.

"[5] In his diary entry dated 3 March 1994, Bowie wrote that he was happy with the current musical direction and had plans to remake the Buddha track "Dead Against It", although this never came to fruition.

[5][7] To compose the lyrics, Bowie ran words through an Apple Macintosh program, which mirrored the William S. Burroughs-inspired cut-up technique he had previously used for albums such as Diamond Dogs (1974).

Songs recorded in New York included "Outside", "Thru These Architects Eyes", "We Prick You", "I Have Not Been to Oxford Town", "No Control", a rerecording of the Buddha track "Strangers When We Meet", and reworkings of "Hallo Spaceboy" and "I'm Deranged".

magazine described as "murder and mutilation for public consumption", pervade society,[8] and "concept muggings" merit their own police division funded by the "Arts Protectorate of London".

[20] Bowie described Adler, the protagonist, as an individual who uses nostalgia to look back on simpler times: "He's really rather despondent that things are broken into this fragmented chaotic kind of state.

[39] The biographer Christopher Sandford finds the music evocative of the "faux-jazz stylings" found on Aladdin Sane (1973),[40] while in Spin magazine, Barry Walters noted the presence of progressive rock.

[41] Other commentators, including Nick DeRiso of Ultimate Classic Rock, recognised styles of techno, grunge and industrial over "the electronic soundbeds" that exemplified the Berlin Trilogy.

[3][45] Certain tracks, such as "The Hearts Filthy Lesson", "I'm Deranged" and "We Prick You", combine elements of jungle and drum and bass, genres Bowie fully explored on his next studio album, Earthling (1997).

[3] Writing for Rock and Roll Globe, Lee Zimmerman stated: "The music flow[s] in a continuous surge of sound and expression, a forward thrust that left little room for melody, but shared an intriguing atmospheric ambiance instead.

[35] "Hallo Spaceboy", which was developed from an instrumental written by Gabrels titled "Moondust",[4] is an industrial track that Pegg calls "a hardcore maelstrom of sci-fi noise, hypnotic high-speed drumming and an insistent, speaker-hopping four-note guitar riff".

[54] Compared to the original version on The Buddha of Suburbia, the remake of "Strangers When We Meet" contains a more lush arrangement influenced by U2's Eno co-produced The Joshua Tree (1987).

[45] On the other hand, Trainer considered it an "odd" way to end the album, writing that it was "clearly an attempt to...inject a sense of calm whilst perpetuating the noir-ish air of mystery".

"I'd Rather Be Chrome" follows, displaying a repeating phrase throughout and contains more narration from Adler over, in Pegg's words, a "prowling, catchy riff", before the lyrics delve into topics previously explored on Low (1977).

It features patterns similar to "A Small Plot of Land", along with funk playing from the backing musicians, numerous sound effects and narration from Adler and Stone.

One section, titled "Nothing to Be Desired", was issued as a bonus track on "The Hearts Filthy Lesson" CD single, and remains the only material from Leon that was officially released.

Outside – The Nathan Adler Diaries: A Hyper-cycle, was released on 25 September 1995 by Virgin America in the US and Arista, BMG and RCA in other territories on LP and CD formats.

[50] Anticipating that the narrative of the album might be inaccessible to fans when it was released, one of the record executives in Mexico, Arturo López Gavito, commissioned a comic to clarify the story.

[39] Further analysing the cultural landscape beyond music at that time, Pegg states that Outside arrived alongside the "glamorous cruelty" of Pulp Fiction (1994); it "inhabited the trashy cyberpunk milieu" of films such as Judge Dredd, Tank Girl and 12 Monkeys (all 1995); and exhibited elements of "extraterrestrial conspiracy theories" brought to the forefront on television by The X-Files.

"The Hearts Filthy Lesson" was played over the end credits of Seven (1995), while "A Small Plot of Land" was the theme song for the 1996 BBC miniseries A History of British Art.

[j] A writer for Time Out magazine elaborated: "[The] edifice of sounds, cultures, rhythms, samples and textures, with randomised lyrics that don't much tell a story as create word-moods, regards the open-minded listener with Bowie's best album for 15 years.

Ikon's Taylor Parkes complained that "Bowie's desperate desire to be considered 'highbrow' has snuffed out any potential of accidental alchemy" and promptly dismissed the record as a "sorry sack of shit ... facile, confused and immature ... quite simply, rubbish.

[20] Nevertheless, after enduring pressure from Virgin, Bowie rescinded and began rehearsals to tour America in August 1995, thereafter extending the number of dates by early September and adding a European leg.

"[20] He further explained to Ikon:[24] Overall, a long-term ambition is to make it a series of albums extending to 1999—to try to capture, using this device, what the last five years of this millennium feel like ... Oh, I've got the fondest hopes for the Fin de siècle.

[...] We have this panic button telling us it's gonna be a colossal madness at the end of this century.Having recorded hours of extra material during the sessions, he considered releasing a companion album to Outside before revealing in early 1997 that the follow-up would be called 2.

[26] In the decades following its release, Trynka contends that the rise of iTunes and nonlinear listening patterns through shuffling have made reactions to Outside more positive, with Garson later calling it a career highlight.

[90] Parisien later argued: "The effort required to adequately 'process' [the album] pays off in a richly voyeuristic experience where Bowie once again reflects fringe culture onto the mainstream and forces us to consider that the differences are not so great.

[39] Reviewing Outside on its 25th anniversary, Trainer said it stands out as "an odd, infuriatingly dense, and often brilliant record from (and of) an artist sho [sic], having been one of popular music's leading lights in the 70s, was newly inspired".