New David Bowie single to be released next week?

By Mikael Wood

Feb. 18, 2013 8:43 AM PT

This time David Bowie is warning us.

The veteran English rocker took fans by surprise last month when he released his first new single in a decade and revealed that he’d completed a full studio album due out in March. A luscious, slow-moving ballad peppered with place-names from Berlin (where Bowie made a string of acclaimed records in the late 1970s), “Where Are We Now?” is the initial sampling from “The Next Day,” which Columbia Records will issue in the U.S. on March 12.

For the album’s next single, however, Bowie has evidently offered something of a heads-up: On Saturday a post on his official Facebook profile appeared with what seems to be cover art for “The Stars (Are Out Tonight)” -- one of 14 titles on the new album’s standard-edition track listing -- along with a date, Feb. 26.

By early Monday the post had been liked nearly 30,000 times.

Bowie recorded “The Next Day” with his longtime producer Tony Visconti, who recently told Rolling Stone that the album contains a mix of rock tunes and “funky, mid-tempo songs.” “The Stars (Are Out Tonight)” is one of the rockers, according to Visconti, while other cuts were inspired by “old bump-and-grind stripper music” and by Bowie’s reading “a lot of medieval English history books.”

Listen to “Where Are We Now?” below.