According to Reeves Gabrels, Bowie wanted to remake some of the songs almost immediately after the two met in late 1987, and considered putting some of them on his next album, but Gabrels talked him out of it, suggesting it was too soon to do so. Bowie discussed recording some of the tracks from "Never Let Me Down" with Gabrels again in 1996, prior to going into the studio to make his album "Earthling" (1997), but no tracks were recorded. Bowie had Mario J. McNulty remix the track "Time Will Crawl" in 2008 for his compilation of self-selected favourite songs, "iSelect", and later included the same mix on his career-spanning 50th anniversary compilation, "Nothing Has Changed". At the time Bowie had said, "Oh, to redo the rest of that album", and according to the Parlophone label in 2018, that was the beginning of the desire to "reimagine" the album. In early 2018, musicians including Reeves Gabrels, David Torn, Sterling Campbell, Tim Lefebvre, Nico Muhly and Laurie Anderson started recording in New York's Electric Lady Studios to help fulfill that wish. Of these musicians, Torn, Campbell, Lefebvre and Gabrels were all selected by Bowie before he died in 2016 to take a part in the project. In July 2018, it was announced that a new version of the album, titled "Never Let Me Down 2018", would be released in October of that year. The album includes "newly 'remixed' artwork", unseen images from the original album's photo-shoot by photographer Greg Gorman, and was released as part of the 2018 box set "Loving the Alien (1983–1988)".