The Man Who Sold the World; it was the last time he would see the artist for three or four years. Ronson and Woodmansey also departed due to other personal conflicts with Bowie. Despite his annoyance with Bowie during the sessions, Visconti still rated The Man Who Sold the World as his best work with him until his fourteenth studio album Scary Monsters (and Super Creeps) (1980). Although his new single "Holy Holy", recorded in November 1970 and released in January 1971, was a commercial flop, the single earned Bowie a contract with music publisher Chrysalis. The critical success of the album in the US prompted Mercury to send Bowie on a promotional radio tour of the country in February 1971. Upon his return, he wrote the majority of the material that would appear on the follow-up albums Hunky Dory (1971) and Ziggy Stardust. Bowie also convened with Ronson and Woodmansey, who returned to play on both records. Following the commercial disappointment of Hunky Dory, Bowie finally found commercial success with Ziggy Stardust in 1972. Ronson and Woodmansey, along with bassist Trevor Bolder, would become famous as the Spiders from Mars. Influence and legacy The Man Who Sold the World has been retrospectively described by Bowie's biographers and commentators as the beginning of Bowie's artistic growth, with many also agreeing that it was his first album where he began to find his sound. Buckley has described the album as "the first Bowie album proper", while NME critics Roy Carr and Charles Shaar Murray similarly stated, "this is where the story really starts". Erlewine cited The Man Who Sold the World as the beginning of Bowie's "classic period". Similarly, Annie Zaleski of The A.V. Club called the album his "career blueprint", writing that it musically was a forerunner to the "swaggering electric disorientation" of Ziggy Stardust and Aladdin Sane (1973), but its greater importance on sequencing and atmosphere, as well as stonger songwriting, predated Hunky Dory. Meanwhile, Paul Trynka calls it Bowie's "first truly gripping work". Pegg calls The Man Who Sold the World one of the best and most important albums in the history of rock music. In a 2013 readers' poll for Rolling Stone, it was voted Bowie's tenth greatest album. The album has been praised for the band's performance and the unsettling nature of its music and lyrics. In a review for AllMusic, Erlewine complimented its "tight, twisted