Reality is the twenty-fourth studio album by the English musician David Bowie, originally released in Europe on 15 September 2003, and the following day in America.

His second release through his own ISO label, the album was recorded between January and May 2003 at Looking Glass Studios in New York City, with production by Bowie and longtime collaborator Tony Visconti.

A mostly straightforward rock album with a more direct sound compared to its predecessor Heathen (2002), Reality contains covers of the Modern Lovers' "Pablo Picasso" and George Harrison's "Try Some, Buy Some".

[1][3] Heathen's guitarist David Torn provided "atmospheric" overdubs and lead guitar on "New Killer Star", while Matt Chamberlain played drums on "Bring Me the Disco King" and "Fly".

[b][1][5] Like previous releases, bass, percussion and rhythm guitar parts were recorded live first from January and February, followed by vocals and overdubs from March to May 2003; Bowie, Plati and Campbell primarily played to click tracks from the demos.

[4][12][13] The author James E. Perone writes that the two tracks match the album's autobiographical tones compared to other covers Bowie made throughout his career, which were more often chosen for similar musical styles.

[14] Following an assortment of "extreme" characters from a "gluttonous rock star vampire" to various diminished figures, the biographer Chris O'Leary draws comparisons to The Man Who Sold the World (1970).

[5][14][17] Pegg notes that the thought of "never getting old" has been a mainstay in Bowie's songwriting, in tracks from "Changes" (1971) to "The Pretty Things Are Going to Hell" (1999), and considers "I think about this and I think about personal history" a "key line" for the entire Reality album.

[14] Like several of the album's tracks, "She'll Drive the Big Car" eavesdrops onto a wretched and despairing life in which a woman dreams of wealth but is stuck being a mundane house wife.

[5] It is musically simple, boasting a "faux-naif arrangement of low-tech synthesisers and twanging guitars against a jogging beat", compared by Pegg to the 1980s works of Soft Cell and Depeche Mode.

[20] According to Bowie, the title of "Fall Dog Bombs the Moon" came from a Kellogg Brown & Root article and was subtle commentary on the then-emerging Iraq War.

Almost eight minutes in length, the song embraces a New York jazz sound that sees Garson playing an improvised piano solo similar to his one on "Aladdin Sane" (1973).

[5][6][14] Representing a culmination of the album's lyrical themes, it offers fragmented images of, in Pegg's words, "creeping age, squandered opportunities, thwarted lives and impending dissolution".

[6][14] The outtake "Fly" utilises a funky guitar riff for a tale about a middle-class family man who suffers from anxiety and depression, lyrically forestalling the "domestic American angst" of "New Killer Star" and "She'll Drive the Big Car".

Ditching the airbrushed intellectualism of Heathen, Reality depicts Bowie in a cartoon, anime-style persona, with features typical of Japanese animation, including an exaggerated hairstyle, oversized eyes and simplified lines.

[5][2][17] The song was originally scheduled to be released as the album's second single to coincide with Bowie's UK tour dates, but it was shelved at the last minute, similar to "Slow Burn" the previous year.

"[63] Pitchfork's Eric Carr further contested that "what last year's Heathen implied, and what Reality seems to prove, is that ... Bowie has finally joined us all in the present, mind-young as ever but old enough not to make a show of it".

[50] In the Miami Herald, Howard Cohen commended the artist for playing to his musical strengths rather than "hopping aboard some inappropriate youthful bandwagon".

"[50] Remarking on the lyrics, Ryan Lenz of Associated Press described the album as "an exercise in introspection" and analysed Reality as not "a vehicle for commentary on contemporary times", but rather encapsulating an artist "nearing 60 and finding the world disappointingly clear and never what it seemed".

Uncut's Chris Roberts hailed Reality as "a very, very good sexy-angst album" filled with "lovely, left-handed songs, rich with unexpected angles, daring detours and words which muse over mortality yet emerge seeming upbeat", further summarising the lyrics as "mournful" and the music as "euphoric".

Although she found it inferior to the artist's Berlin-era works, she said Reality stands as "the first sequence of Bowie songs that bears repeated listening in years", concluding that "it is a pleasure, rather than a grim duty done out of respect for the memory of Ziggy Stardust".

[68] The New York Times' writer Mim Udovitch praised Visconti's production as "impeccable" and remarked on the sense of immediacy that "makes you feel that Mr. Bowie and his spectacularly hard-rocking band might be about to materialize in your living room ready for an encore".

Entertainment Weekly's Mark Weingarten cited the production as continuing to hinder Bowie's work since Black Tie White Noise, but nevertheless called the writing an improvement over his previous records.

[52] In The Austin Chronicle, Marc Savlov contended that "While Reality isn't a failure by anyone's standards, there's precious few moments that you can recall, much less hum, an hour after listening to it.

The band spent most of late-August and September 2003 playing various gigs to promote the upcoming release of Reality; the first official show occurred in Copenhagen on 7 October.

[70] However, the tour suffered several setbacks throughout its duration, including the cancellation or postponement of shows in late 2003 due to Bowie contracting laryngitis and influenza, and even the death of a lighting technician in May 2004.

Over the following years, he was spotted at local New York venues and made occasional appearances at concerts by artists including Arcade Fire and David Gilmour, with his final live public performance taking place in November 2006.

[14][75][76] In The Complete David Bowie, Pegg states that one of the album's successes is that it emerges with a "reinvigorated sense of rock attack" following the "delicate, self-consciously artful[ness]" of its predecessor, equating both records to the relationships between Hunky Dory and Ziggy Stardust, or Outside (1995) and Earthling.

Further comparing the two albums, he says Reality offers "less complexity and fewer sonic layers" than Heathen in exchange for "a greater abundance of catchy hooks and buoyant pop-rock atmospherics".

[1] He also argues that Reality loses none of its predecessor's "artistic sensibility" and "its lasting value lies not just in its infectious melodies and evocative lyrics, but in the exquisitely judged oddness of its sonic textures".