8. Diamond Dogs (1974)
Bowie was at work on a musical based on 1984 when George Orwell’s widow declined to loan out rights to her late husband’s literary masterpiece to a kid with a dyed red mullet. He picked up the pieces nicely to create this trepidation-soaked album. The spattering of Isaac Hayes influence is a bit misplaced, but Bowie nails the creepier songs, like "Sweet Thing" and "We Are the Dead." He also delivers, out of the blue, the most radio-friendly single of his career, "Rebel Rebel."

Listen: "Rebel Rebel"  

7. "Heroes" (1977)
Bowie isn’t known for his sincerity, but the title track of "Heroes" is one of the best odes to the old-school virtues of courage and valor ever recorded. Inspired by attempts to escape the Berlin Wall, Bowie has all the fortitude of Ronald Reagan throwing around the term "evil empire" but a much more humanistic touch. Also, the distinctly windy-sounding guitar of Robert Fripp is unforgettable. For the rest of the album, Bowie and Eno expand the thick art-rock sound to both proper songs and instrumentals. The Eastern-flavored "Moss Garden" is gorgeous.

Listen: "Heroes"

6. The Man Who Sold the World (1970)
Bowie’s wildest album is a Nietzsche-and-Lovecraft-referencing sonic horror show full of savior machines, insane super-gods and war-addled rampage killers. It’s the same kind of comic-book stuff that made up Space Oddity, but the addition of Mick Ronson’s sledgehammer guitar seems to have given Bowie license to go absolutely schizoid in his imagery. At this stage, going big and weird tended to have huge payoffs for him. "The Width of a Circle" is an eight-minute song about meeting a doppelganger in some shady patch of the subconscious and it is fucking awesome. 

Listen: "The Width of a Circle" 

5. The Rise and Fall of Ziggy Stardust and the Spiders from Mars (1972)
Ziggy Stardust is the best kind of rock opera: the kind that makes you forget you are listening to one. While The Wall (which, admit it, is sorta ridiculous) is cobbled together through songs, snippets and whacky voice acting, Ziggy Stardust consists of eleven solid tracks that all happen to fit into a narrative about an androgynous alien rock messiah. The best songs, like the sex-heavy "Suffragette City" and the Flash Gordon-evoking "Moonage Daydream," have all the loudness and cheap thrills of a grindhouse movie. 

Listen: "Suffragette City"

4. Aladdin Sane (1973)
Aladdin Sane is the first album Bowie made as a marquee rock star, a role he was born to play and walks into with swagger. It has both an ode to fame ("Watch That Man") and the obligatory warnings of its pitfalls ("The Jean Genie," about the drug-battered Iggy Pop, and "Cracked Actor," with its still-scandalous refrain of "suck, baby, suck"). Listening to the way Mike Garson’s fingers dance across the piano on the title track and how guitarist Ronson competes with an orgasmic backup singer on "Panic in Detroit," it sounds like Bowie's sidemen were also going for demigod status.
 
Listen: "Panic in Detroit"

3. Hunky Dory (1971)
Bowie often reinvigorates himself by appropriating a new genre. But when he took on basic pop — the kind that was just being reestablishing after the psychedelic years — it was the style itself that sounded fresher than ever. Hunky Dory is a sassy album with a few moments of sincerity (like "Kooks," a touching tribute to family) amidst a sea of wit. Bowie pawns an icon in "Andy Warhol" and smooths out the jagged riff rock of The Velvet Underground into palpable pop in "Queen Bitch," inventing glam rock in the process. Kicked off by the career anthem "Changes," Hunky Dory laid out the basics of Bowie's sound, one that he'd adapt continually but knew was too good to abandon completely.

Listen: "Queen Bitch"

2. Low (1977)
It's easy to have personality when dressed in multi-color spandex and fake-felating your guitarist, but Bowie shows his quietest work can have as much character as his loudest on Low, the first entry in the Berlin trilogy and the one that shows him the most burnt out on cocaine and fame. Side one features synth-driven songs about boredom and depression that are succinct as if it to drive home the point there is no resolution to this kind of despair. "Always Crashing the Same Car" is the picture of fragility, and on "Be My Wife," Bowie sings the three words as a desperate plea. On the second half, he loses language completely and expresses himself beautifully with icy synthesizer notes. It may be too moody for some, but Low is Bowie's boldest, bravest and most cohesive album-length statement. 

Listen: "Always Crashing the Same Car"

1. Station to Station (1976)
For Station to Station, Bowie spliced together krautrock and Philadelphia soul, one genre defined as clean and automated and another known for its sensuality. The resulting sound is as smooth as polypropylene as harmonious in all its internal intricacies as a locomotive. Bowie is at the height of his powers, capable of delivering a ten-minute epic with occult references (the title track) and then the perfect pop-soul nugget ("Golden Years") without altering his slightly sinister tone in between. The character he embodies, the Thin White Duke, doesn’t follow a storyline the way Ziggy Stardust does, but allows him an artistic channel for all his coke-numbed stare and sense of impeding doom. Here Bowie perfectly executes some of his most tricky ideas and here is where years of experimentation pay off spectacularly.

Listen: "Station to Station"