It's interesting how almost every album featured a song or two that forecasted the direction he would go with the next album.
His very first album, while sounding completely different from anything that came after it, at least showed a lot of lyrical seeds of themes he would explore throughout his career. His second album Space Oddity (1969) had "Unwashed and Slightly Dazed", which could almost fit into the drug rock proto metal of The Man Who Sold The World (1970). It also included "Cygnet Committee", which would not have sounded out of place on Hunky Dory (1971). His fourth, Hunky Dory, had "Queen Bitch", sounding like a preview of Ziggy Stardust (1972) and Aladdin Sane (1973). Diamond Dogs' (1974) "1984" and "Rock and Roll With Me" foreshadowed his Blue Eyed Soul period. Young Americans' (1975) "Fame", recorded at the tail end of that album's sessions, saw the smooth Philly soul sound of Young Americans beginning to melt away in favor of the slightly harder edged funk sound that was to be featured on Station to Station (1976). Station's title track seemed to hint at the krautrock influenced Low (1977) and Iggy Pop's The Idiot (1977) (produced and mostly co-written by Bowie, featuring Bowie's backing band, and recorded right before Low, it is the missing link between his soul and "berlin" periods and as such probably deserves honorary status as a part of Bowie's discography). 'Heroes' (1977) had "The Secret Life of Arabia", which sounds more like any song on Lodger (1979) than it does like anything on its parent album. Lodger, if not necessarily a direct musical link to the following Scary Monsters (1980), saw Bowie outrospecting more in his lyrics than he had on Low or 'Heroes, featuring themes of travel, social critiques ("Repetition", shining a light on domestic abuse, or "Boys Keep Swinging", half praising and half mocking gay culture and male privilege); Scary Monsters very much followed in that vein, as a whole being an album that saw Bowie looking more outward than inward. His 80s work sort of went in its own direction completely, although Never Let Me Down (1987) does to some degree show Bowie attempting to return to a more rock oriented sound than the more danceable albums Let's Dance (1983) and Tonight (1984), and "rock out" he would do in spades on the subsequent Tin Machine (1989) and Tin Machine II (1991), arguably more than at any other point in his career. Black Tie White Noise (1993) and Outside (1995) featured hints of the techno-heavy Earthling (his most underrated late period album, in my opinion) (1997), and so on....
I'm not sure if this is especially type related, but it does at least reveal that Bowie was always looking forward at least a few steps, considering his next move, experimenting with possible new directions. He also made a lot of references and call-backs to earlier periods. "Ashes to Ashes" (1980) is a direct sequel to "Space Oddity" (1969), his appearance on Earthling's cover in bright red, cropped hair and a tattered union jack jacket seemed to present a sort of latter day, middle aged version of his Ziggy Stardust character. Bowie was also reported to have envisioned the character Jareth in 1986's Labyrinth as a sort of version of a Ziggy character, a failed Rockstar now resigned to lording over a dreary backwater kingdom, his court of beastly goblins the only remaining audience for his music.