“Heroes” isn’t merely the peak achievement of David Bowie’s Berlin Trilogy; it feels like the moment that his entire 1970s discography was building toward. Throughout the album’s 10 tracks, we hear all the elements the singer had toyed with before—theatrical rock, flamboyant funk, Syd Barrett whimsy, curtain-closing balladry, krautrock precision, austere electronics, free-jazz wandering—fused into an immaculate, 360-degree portrait of Bowie’s sound and vision. “Heroes” also emphasizes a quality that’s often downplayed in discussions of this phase: While the Berlin Trilogy has become shorthand for Bowie at his most fearlessly experimental, the music he created in this period is positively juddering with vim and vigor. That nervy energy can be largely attributed to the album’s recording locale. The only entry in the Berlin Trilogy to be entirely conceived in the city from start to finish, “Heroes” was laid down at Hansa Studios in the west, a stone’s throw from the Berlin Wall; from their window, Bowie and co. could see the Russian snipers ready to take out any potential defectors from the east. Released in 1977, “Heroes” carries over much of the same personnel as the preceding Low, including producer Tony Visconti, spiritual advisor Brian Eno, guitarist Carlos Alomar, bassist George Murray, and drummer Dennis Davis. It also follows a similar split structure, with electrified rock songs populating the first side, and ambient compositions on the second. But it differs in a few crucial respects. Where Alomar’s funky style had been an animating force of Bowie’s mid-1970s sound, “Heroes” finds him playing the rhythm-guitar counterpoint to King Crimson axe-master Robert Fripp, whose freakozoid guitar noise smears like hot mercury over songs like “Beauty and the Beast” and “Blackout,” amplifying the overall sense of delirium. And where Low presented an oppositional relationship between Bowie’s pop and avant-garde sensibilities, “Heroes” achieves a more harmonious balance between the two. The exuberant kosmische piece “V-2 Schenider” serves as a natural bridge into more meditative pieces like “Moss Garden,” on which ominous helicopter sounds are offset by a soothing string-plucked instrumental. And even in its darkest moments, “Heroes” provides a light at the end of the tunnel, with the closing track, “The Secret Life of Arabia,” guiding listeners back to proper song territory with a flash of debonair exotica that anticipates the incoming New Romantic generation. Like the city that birthed it, “Heroes” is an album divided, but it’s undergirded by a defiant sense of optimism. And nowhere is that sentiment felt more profoundly than on the album’s towering title track. Folding Bowie’s past as a Velvet Underground-worshipping rocker into his new incarnation as a Teutonic-pop prophet, “Heroes” remains an underdog anthem for the ages. And though it came in the thick of Bowie’s most exploratory phase, the song is a masterclass in steadiness and simplicity, coaxing maximal power and drama out of the subtlest of shifts. It’s like a revolution building in slow motion: When Bowie shifts to his dramatic higher register for the fourth verse, it feels like a call-to-arms, and by the time those call-and-response backing vocals join in for the fifth pass, the rabble are ready to tear down the wall. Bowie had spent much of his career breaking down genre and gender barriers; with “Heroes”, he harnessed pop music’s potential to dismantle geopolitical ones.