A crop of the album cover for David Bowie's Heroes (1977) Image via RCA Records By Jeremy Urquhart Published Jul 7, 2026, 12:06 AM EDT Jeremy has more than 2600 published articles on Collider to his name, and has been writing for the site since February 2022. He's an omnivore when it comes to his movie-watching diet, so will gladly watch and write about almost anything, from old Godzilla films to gangster flicks to samurai movies to classic musicals to the French New Wave to the MCU... well, maybe not the Disney+ shows. His favorite directors include Martin Scorsese, Sergio Leone, Akira Kurosawa, Quentin Tarantino, Werner Herzog, John Woo, Bob Fosse, Fritz Lang, Guillermo del Toro, and Yoji Yamada. He's also very proud of the fact that he's seen every single Nicolas Cage movie released before 2022, even though doing so often felt like a tremendous waste of time. He's plagued by the question of whether or not The Room is genuinely terrible or some kind of accidental masterpiece, and has been for more than 12 years (and a similar number of viewings). When he's not writing lists - and the occasional feature article - for Collider, he also likes to upload film reviews to his Letterboxd profile (username: Jeremy Urquhart) and Instagram account. He has achieved his 2025 goal of reading all 13,467 novels written by Stephen King, and plans to spend the next year or two getting through the author's 82,756 short stories and 105,433 novellas. Sign in to your Collider account Add Us On Summary Generate a summary of this story follow Follow followed Followed Like Like Thread 1 Log in Here is a fact-based summary of the story contents: Try something different: Show me the facts Explain it like I’m 5 Give me a lighthearted recap There’s a chase to cut to. Things must be kept brief. David Bowie released a ton of albums in the 1970s, which was his strongest decade, in terms of his music. And critically speaking, since the 1980s was good for him commercially, largely thanks to Let’s Dance being as big as it was. And the 1980s might've been stronger for Bowie, the actor, since he was in Merry Christmas, Mr. Lawrence , Labyrinth , and The Hunger that decade.
But the music… the 1970s was where it was at. Bowie did a bit of everything this decade, and he adopted different personas throughout, also switching up genres with just about every new album. There are 11 albums to get through, which makes this a bit more of an endeavor, as far as typing goes, than the usual top 10 , but this decade for this artist is worth it.
Well, before getting to the good stuff, there is Pin Ups . Maybe Pin Ups shouldn't entirely be categorized as belonging among the “bad stuff,” yet it isn't particularly great. It’s a covers album, basically. That makes it a bit less interesting, by default, since with the other David Bowie albums of the 1970s, you get pretty much nothing but originals that showcased Bowie’s songwriting abilities on top of his singing skills.
You'll inevitably listen to Pin Ups if you're a completionist, and feel compelled to hear it all, but if you're not at that high a level of the David Bowie fandom, you don’t really need to give this one a spin.
It’s just singing here. Bowie tackles a bunch of songs from the 1960s , and some of them don’t sound terrible, but little here feels impressive or essential. You'll inevitably listen to Pin Ups if you're a completionist, and feel compelled to hear it all, but if you're not at that high a level of the David Bowie…