It featured contributions from session musicians, some of whom he had worked with in the past, including Gerry Leonard, Earl Slick, Gail Ann Dorsey, Steve Elson, Sterling Campbell and Zachary Alford.

[5] Bowie sought out his longtime producer Tony Visconti in November 2010, leading to the recording of demos with guitarist Gerry Leonard and drummer Sterling Campbell.

After about a dozen demo tracks primarily consisting of keyboards and wordless guide vocals for melodies, Bowie returned home and spent four months rewriting and developing the material they recorded.

[4][5] Songs taped during the week-long session included "Boss of Me", "Dirty Boys", "God Bless the Girl", "I'd Rather Be High", "I'll Take You There", "The Informer", "Love Is Lost" and "Where Are We Now?

Dorsey and Leonard were afraid the artist would abort the album; Magic Shop assistant engineer Brian Thorn commented: "I was prepared to sit on it for as long as I needed to.

[9] The new arrival Henry Hey, whose previous credits included works with George Michael and Rod Stewart, contributed piano overdubs over several sessions at both the Magic Shop and Human Worldwide on "Where Are We Now?

[6][13] Bowie's label were also unaware of the sessions; Sony Music president Rob Stringer did not learn of the project's existence until October 2012, when he was invited to hear a few tracks.

[5] In October 2011, King Crimson guitarist Robert Fripp, who played on "Heroes" (1977) and Scary Monsters (1980), posted on his blog about a dream he had in which he received an invite from Bowie to work on a new project.

[18][19] The tracks feature similar styles and references to many of Bowie's past albums, from Ziggy Stardust (1972) and Low (1977), to Never Let Me Down (1987) and Hours (1999);[5] several critics likened it to the music of Scary Monsters in particular.

In contrast to the spiritual ideals that characterised Heathen and Reality, the author relates The Next Day's lyrical themes to Bowie's 1967 self-titled debut, Lodger (1979) and his first album with the band Tin Machine (1989).

[4] The following track "Dirty Boys" is an abrupt change of tone,[21] and uses a slower-tempo, stuttering staccato rhythm emphasised by Slick's guitar and Elson's baritone saxophone.

[4] It contains changing time signatures and chord progressions, recalling the drum and bass styles of Earthling and anticipating the free jazz experimentation of "Sue (Or in a Season of Crime)" (2014).

[4][44] "You Feel So Lonely You Could Die" references Ziggy Stardust, using the drum beat of "Five Years" in the outro,[31] and the guitar figure of "Rock 'n' Roll Suicide" throughout, as well as the vocal arrangement from The Man Who Sold the World's "The Supermen" (1970).

[4][45] In Consequence of Sound, Cat Blackard commented that "the lyrics easily fit into Ziggy's future world of indifferent, over-indulged youths, five years before humanity's end".

[d] Pegg describes the track as "a profoundly imagined, superbly controlled piece of work which gathers up the distilled loneliness, self-doubt and existential anxiety of fifty years of songwriting, and boils them away on a slow, relentless simmer".

[4] Its building music combines an acoustic Bo Diddley riff with electric ambient guitar out of Heathen; the lyrics describe a girl who was "aiming for the stars but landed on the clouds" and has run out of options.

[51] Similar to the album's title track, "Atomica" features a guitar-heavy sound with slapping bass and a post-glam groove that recalls the 1988 re-recording of Lodger's "Look Back in Anger".

[53] The lyrics pay tribute to Martin McDonagh's dark comedy In Bruges (2008),[4] in which a narrator admits to committing an unspecified tragedy that led to a violent death but his true identity, whether a police informant or contract killer, is unclear.

[33] The viral marketing campaign launched to promote The Next Day on 15 February 2013 grew out of the concept behind the album cover, taking seemingly ordinary images and subverting them through the addition of a white square.

[69] Elsewhere, The Next Day topped the charts in several countries, including Belgium, Croatia, Czech Republic, Denmark, Finland, Germany, Ireland, New Zealand, Norway, Poland, Portugal, Sweden and Switzerland,[g] and reached number two in Australia, Austria, Canada, France, Italy, and Spain.

Pegg states that in addition to its religious commentary, the video is "yet another dire warning not to place our faith in the hands of ideologues, of prophets, of messiahs, of people who begin by giving you everything that you want.

[17] In Q magazine, Andrew Harrison applauded "a loud, thrilling, steamrollingly confident rock and roll album full of noise, energy and words that – if as cryptic as ever they were – sound like they desperately need to be sung".

[m] Edna Gundersen of USA Today wrote that although his glitter rock, plastic soul and electronica releases of the 1970s remain among his best works, the "elegance, urgency and versatility" of The Next Day prove that "pop music's craftiest chameleon has lost none of his sound [and] vision".

[97] Several found the songs densely packed with puzzles that made repeating and rewarding listens for fans,[19][105] with Record Collector's Jason Draper arguing that the album would reveal itself more and more as time passes.

[23][16][94] Spin's Alfred Soto said the collision of different ideas resulted in "colorless abstractions" and criticised Bowie for taking a long hiatus, only to return with an album that sounded like its predecessor.

[94] Writing for The Wire, Mark Fisher described the album as mediocre and undeserving of its wide acclaim and publicity, which he wrote "point[ed] to a wider malaise in contemporary music" because it proved that anything of low artistic merit could achieve success via "artfully timed PR".

[26] Bowie's first project following The Next Day was the experimental jazz track "Sue (Or in a Season of Crime)", recorded with bandleader Maria Schneider,[117][118] and released on the compilation album Nothing Has Changed in 2014.

He primarily agrees with critics in praising the performances, particularly Bowie's and Visconti's production, but finds the album overlong and slow in its middle section, which he attributes to the number of tracks.

[5] O'Leary considers that Bowie could have easily made it a triple album during the analogue age, but as it stands in the streaming era, The Next Day is "a fluctuating set of tracks whose sequence and length depends on the listener's mood and patience".

[4] In 2016, Bryan Wawzenek of Ultimate Classic Rock placed The Next Day at number 13 out of 26 in a list ranking Bowie's studio albums from worst to best, finding "strong songwriting" amid non-innovative but overall enjoyable music.