5 David Bowie Songs That Sound Even Cooler Today

Personal "best of" music lists can evolve over time, but there's always been at least one Bowie tune among our favorite songs. That's because Bowie — as one of his most famous songs says — embraced "Changes." Bowie's restless reinvention made his evolution as an artist and icon far more drastic than his contemporaries, particularly in the 1970s. For instance, the Rolling Stones pretty much retained their blues-infused rock sound and debauched bad-boy image throughout the decade. In the same 10-year span, however, Bowie went from the androgynous hard rocker of "The Man Who Sold the World" to the intellectual aesthete of the Berlin trilogy.

Along the way, he was an alien rock star, a soul man, and the mad Thin White Duke. This shape shifting is reflected in Bowie's genre-jumping music. If you don't like Bowie's cabaret-and-folk-inflected singer-songwriter material on "Hunky Dory," then the glam pop "Ziggy"/"Aladdin Sane" era or the funk-soul "Station to Station" mashup might be your cup of tea.

This makes choosing cooler-than-ever Bowie tunes a challenge. For this rundown, we've omitted immediate hits like "Fame" and "Let's Dance," and previously-rediscovered gems like fan favorite "Heroes," which didn't dent the charts when it dropped in 1977, but broke Billboard's Hot Alternative Top Ten in 2026. Instead, here are Bowie gems and deep cuts that have hidden in plain sight. They've always been awesome — has David Bowie ever not been cool? — but seem even fresher today.

The supernatural, seductive "Width of a Circle" opens Bowie's third studio album "The Man Who Sold the World," with guitarist Mick Ronson's ominous hard rock riff.

"David Bowie: An Illustrated Discography" notes that it was the only song Bowie had written when he entered the studio to record "The Man Who Sold the World" in 1970. Like Bowie's breakthrough single "A Space Oddity," "Width of a Circle" traces a journey, but instead of floating in space, the song's protagonist has come down to earth, spiraling into a maelstrom of horror. Perhaps remembering that "A Space Oddity" had been one of the most controversial songs of 1969, Bowie seems determined to up the outrage here.

Bowie's vulnerable vocals recount a descent into the underworld — perhaps one of Dante's nine circles of Hell — to encounter a dark, bewitching god or demon. The song, perhaps an allegory for a spiritual quest, features the multi-part structure of progressive rock, but the music is simpler, similar to Black Sabbath's. The difference is that "Width of a Circle" features an attenuated, distant guitar riding atop its thick, thundering rhythm section. It's blues rock from another dimension, with lyrics addressing gender fluidity and notions of masculinity, plus a shout out to Khalil Gibran.

Bowie would return to occult scenarios with "Diamond Dogs," but here he eschews that album's theatrical decadence. Bowie sounds deadly serious on "Width of a Circle," which makes this alluring yet harrowing journey so compelling.

What David Bowie's former bandmates said about him reveals much about his genius. "He always had a vision," Diamond Dogs keyboardist Mike Garson told Quartz. "Whatever it took to stretch the boundaries, no matter how wild it sounded, David was game." With songs drawn from a proposed musical adaptation of George Orwell's "1984" — aborted when Orwell's widow refused access to the dystopian classic — and William S. Burroughs' cut-up technique, which rearranges words to produce new meanings, "Diamond Dogs," Bowie's eighth studio album, is certainly wild. Breaking ties with "Ziggy Stardust" producer Ken Scott and Spiders From Mars guitarist Mick Ronson, Bowie produced and played lead guitar, as well as saxophone.

At the center of the album's concept, a theatrically heightened, oddly glamorous, post-apocalyptic dystopia, is "Sweet Thing/Candidate/Sweet Thing." With virtuosic singing that signposts goth rock and a charging climax that presages punk, the three-song suite is among Bowie's most ambitious compositions. The song cycle, dominated by Garson's free-jazz piano and Bowie's grinding, squawking guitar and trilling sax, begins with the artist singing from the sepulchral depths of his register, before ascending to the vertiginous top of his tenor. It's an exuberance performance, arguably Bowie's finest recorded vocal.

The epic narrative winds through transactional relationships, sleazy politicians, cocaine's short-term bliss, crass consumerism where shops sell "Bullet proof faces; Charlie Manson, Cassius Clay," and cleansing transcendence when two lovers jump into a river holding hands. Bowie's vision has rarely been so trenchant and moving.

Bowie produced his best music during periods of transition between personae, homes, and signature sounds. "A New Career In A New Town" closes side one of Bowie's 11th studio album "Low," and marks the shift from the LP's "song side," a succession of autobiographical avant-pop fragments, to its second side of ambient soundscapes. A brief wordless snippet that arguably tells the story about Bowie's imminent move to Berlin — the "new town" in the tune's title — "A New Career In A New Town" also depicts an artist shorn of masks like "Station to Station's" polarizing Thin White Duke.

Like all of "Low," the meditative tune is influenced by the electronic music of Krautrock artists like Kraftwerk and Neu. It's dominated by a booming, robotic drum sound, devised with a pitch shifter by co-producer Tony Visconti, who is also responsible for Bowie's "Heroes," one of the five best rock songs for boomers and their kids to bond over. According to the producer's autobiography, "Bowie, Bolan and the Brooklyn Boy," when Bowie asked what the then-experimental studio gear did, Visconti said, "It f**** with the fabric of time."

Over swirling synthesizers, the tune ramps up to a harder rocking sound with crashing beats and Bowie's locomotive-wail harmonica. "A New Career In A New Town" announces its intentions with its title. It's about jettisoning what no longer serves you, evoking the wistful yet hopeful feeling of packing your bags, and hitting the gas with only the horizon ahead.

Amid woozy electronics and a killer bass line that seems ingrained in our collective DNA, "New Killer Star" opens "Reality," released in 2003. Sung with the numb fascination of someone in shock, the song's introductory lyrics reference the 9-11 attacks that devastated the artist's New York City home: "See the great white scar over Battery Park." Bowie eschewed politics but embraced topicality, and it is here in the song's title — "new killer" mimicking the American president's pronunciation of the alleged "nuclear" weapons used as a precept for war.

Bowie once could have belonged with the handful of rock stars who were really weird people, but by the time "Reality" dropped in 2003 he was a happy family man. Speaking to The Word, archived on journalist Paul Du Noyer's website, Bowie revealed why he had embraced well-adjusted optimism in the face of disaster. "I've got a 3-year-old daughter now ... she is going to have a great life, dammit," he said. "It doesn't behoove me to be the nihilist any more, even for creative reasons."

Though it maintains its crackling ambience throughout, "New Killer Star" brightens on its chorus, with trebly guitar spiraling into lyrics that marvel at things formerly taken for granted: trees, sidewalks and buildings. Another lyric, "Let's face the music and dance," even copies the title of a Fred Astaire tune that brightened people's horizons during the Great Depression. Clear-eyed and forward looking, "New Killer Star" envisions better days ahead.

Bowie's best songs have always been maddeningly, playfully contradictory, and the title track to his final album "Blackstar" is no exception. The song seems to be more concerned with evoking emotion rather than meaning, nodding to his fertile 1970s output with a title and lyrics that could be revisiting the artist's concerns with the occult, science fiction. In quantum physics, a black star is a dense entity that is formed under conditions previously believed to give rise to black holes.

Bowie's epic nearly 10-minute tune suggests arcane elusive concepts. Bracketing by what sounds like chants for a magical ceremony, Bowie sings, "In the villa of Ormen, stands a solitary candle." Ormen, a village in Norway, also means "serpent" in Norwegian, a creature common in the writings of occultist Aleister Crowley, whom Bowie read in the 1970s. It's more certain that "Blackstar," released on Bowie's 69th birthday — two days before his death from cancer — addresses what Shakespeare called "the undiscovered country" in "Hamlet."

With "Blackstar," Bowie bows out with a musical mix of old and new. Amid queasy and majestic orchestrations and martial drums, syncopated jazz beats bordering on drums 'n' bass — a staple of Bowie's "Earthling" album, and honking saxophone that harkens to "Diamond Dogs," "Blackstar" leads the listener all over the musical and emotional map before settling into a woozy, swinging show tune. It's dark and weirdly romantic, evoking not dread, but the mystery beyond the mortal veil.