Blackstar

Bowie demoed with Visconti in June 2014, recorded with a band that included the saxophonist Donny McCaslin in the first months of 2015, and sang his vocals in April and May at Human Worldwide. He was having chemotherapy for liver cancer. In November 2015 he told Visconti that the cancer had returned and was terminal. Visconti called the album a parting gift.

It came out on his 69th birthday, and he died on 10 January 2016. The title track, released as the lead single on 19 November 2015, runs 9:57 after being edited down from more than eleven minutes, and its ten-minute video by Johan Renck won Best Art Direction at the 2016 MTV Video Music Awards. It went to number one in the UK, with 146,000 first-week sales, and was his first US number one, with 181,000. It topped the charts in 24 countries. Metacritic scored it 87 out of 100. Pitchfork's Ryan Dombal called its mix of jazz, malice and historical role-play intoxicating, and noted that Bowie's half-brother Terry Burns had introduced him to jazz as a preteen. Neil McCormick of the Telegraph called it extraordinary and gave it five stars, and Jon Pareles of the New York Times wrote that it was at once emotive and cryptic, structured and spontaneous. At the 2017 Grammys it won Best Alternative Music Album, Best Recording Package and Best Engineered Album, Non-Classical, and the title track won Best Rock Song and Best Rock Performance.