Prince's Timeless opens the vault ten songs at a time

Timeless, the new posthumous album by @Prince , contains 10 tracks spanning 39 years. That's both why it is being sold and why the argument is already raging around it. It starts with a 1977 studio track by a teenage [MENTION:Prince] and ends at one of his last concerts in 2016, then manages to wrap it all up in 41 minutes. His estate says the small scale is deliberate. Some fans wanted the doors to the vault to be much wider

The album dropped on August 28 through NPG Records and Legacy Recordings. It's the first [MENTION:Prince] collection assembled to cover every major period of his career, rather than just one of his familiar albums or a shelved project. The songs are arranged chronologically, so Timeless feels more like 10 dated stops than a new studio album.

Those stops aren't all the same kind of archival find. "I Am You" was recorded at Sound 80 in Minneapolis in 1977. The version of "Tick Tick Bang" is from 1981, nine years before [MENTION:Prince] reworked it for Graffiti Bridge. "With This Tear" is his own 1991 version of a song written for [MENTION:Céline Dion], while "Calabama" comes from the 2003 Musicology sessions. "The Guilty Ones," recorded at Paisley Park in 2007, has also been released with a new video.

The last two songs bring the timeline close to the end. "Bestest Friend" was recorded at Paisley Park in September 2012 and wasn't known to fans until this release. "How Come U Don't Call Me Anymore?" is different from the nine studio tracks around it. It was recorded live at Oracle Arena in Oakland on March 4, 2016, during the Piano & a Microphone Tour. [MENTION:Prince] died the following month.

L. Londell McMillan, a co-manager of the estate and one of the compilation's producers, told Rolling Stone that the team listened to about 35 or 40 serious songs before settling on 10. That was just part of the available material. A lot has been digitized, but more still needs to be transferred and heard. Some of the sources left don't have all the parts needed for a modern mix.

McMillan's defense of the release is brutal. He said nearly 200 previously unreleased songs have been released since [MENTION:Prince] died, often buried in expensive expanded editions that some buyers never bother to explore. The estate thinks a 10-track disc can introduce the music to younger listeners more easily than a 60-song box for $125. It also says more music will be released later in 2026 and early 2027.

That doesn't answer whether these were the right 10 tracks. A Rolling Stone review published on September 1 called it flat and argued that the order of the tracks doesn't match up. The review singled out "The Guilty Ones" and the early "Tick Tick Bang" as the best tracks, but found the live closing track tacked on. That's just one critic's opinion, not evidence of what's in the vault, but it catches the edge of turning four decades into a sampler. Range can sound like randomness.

The estate's own description of it is less flattering than the mythology surrounding the vault. Timeless isn't some lost masterpiece that [MENTION:Prince] had sequenced and completed. Compilation producers McMillan, Charles F. Spicer Jr. and Chris James picked the material, and James mixed and mastered it. The album is their journey through the archive as much as it documents [MENTION:Prince]'s unfinished release plans.

That's why this last live show is so shocking. It could have ended on another pristine studio discovery, but instead it left in the audience singing and clapping along. The estate wanted a bridge from the private recordings to the public performer. For those waiting for unheard albums, [MENTION:The Revolution] sessions or a much bigger box, 10 songs will still feel cautious. At least the estate has now put a timeline behind its promise that this is a beginning, not the whole excavation.