David Bowie’s ‘Blackstar’ finally gives him a number-one album in the US, days after his death

David Bowie’s final album on Sunday hit number one in the United States, his adopted home, with the British music legend posthumously achieving a feat he never managed in life.

Blackstar, which was released two days before Bowie’s January 10 death from a secret battle with cancer, debuted at number one on the Billboard album chart for the week through Thursday.

Amid the outpouring of grief, Bowie not only scored his first US number one album but became among the rare artists to have two in the top five, with his greatest hits collection Best of Bowie, released in 2002, hitting number four.

Blackstar wrested number one from Adele's blockbuster 25, which had topped the chart for seven weeks.

Blackstar - which came out on Bowie’s 69th birthday - had immediately won critical acclaim for its experimentalism as the long-reinventing artist developed a dark, hard jazz sound.

His death threw a whole new light on Blackstar as it emerged that he intended the album as a final statement, full of meditation on a half-century on the cutting edge of music.

Especially poignant was the video for Lazarus as Bowie levitates from a hospital bed and returns into a dark closet.

Bowie spent the final two decades of his life living in New York and had said that his first love was African-American music, especially funk and soul.