Prince's estate releases Timeless, a ten-song album of vault recordings

Prince's estate has released Timeless, a ten-song collection of rare and previously unreleased recordings that reaches from a 1977 studio demo to a live performance from his final tour in 2016. It is billed as the first Prince compilation curated across every major era of his career, and it arrives in the tenth anniversary year of his death.

The lead track is "The Guilty Ones," a 2007 recording released as a single with a video and recorded by Ian Boxill at Paisley Park. The rest of the sequence runs "I Am You," "Tick Tick Bang," "Heaven," "I Wonder," "With This Tear," "Stone," "Calabama," "The Guilty Ones," "Bestest Friend" and a live "How Come U Don't Call Me Anymore?" Some of these songs have circulated for years in other forms, but none of these particular recordings has been released before.

Charles F. Spicer Jr., co-owner of Prince Legacy LLC, said the sequencing was designed to show range: "these ten songs reveal Prince as an artist who was always fearless, innovative and creative on his own terms." He added that closing on a live performance mattered because it captures the room singing along. The album was mixed and mastered by Chris James, a former Prince engineer whose credits take in Art Official Age and HITnRUN Phase Two, and who recorded "Bestest Friend" at Paisley Park in 2012. It was produced by L. Londell McMillan, Spicer and James, and first announced in June during Prince Celebration 2026.

The reviews have been rough. Rolling Stone called Timeless flat, a set of outtakes laid out chronologically that fails to cohere into anything, and singled out only "The Guilty Ones" and the original 1981 New Wave version of "Tick Tick Bang," which resurfaced in a very different arrangement on Graffiti Bridge in 1990. Speaking on NPR, the music journalist Alan Light was gentler but landed in a similar place: the range on display is real, and the record is still a grab bag rather than an album statement.

Light also set out why these releases keep looking like compromises. Prince left no will, and Minnesota law seats every sibling and half-sibling at the table, so anything that moves needs a lot of signatures. Ambitious projects have collapsed on that: Ava DuVernay walked away from a Netflix documentary series, and a ten-part series Ezra Edelman spent years making was rejected by the estate. A ten-song survey is the kind of thing everybody can agree to.

What sits behind it all is the vault, which Light described as holding hundreds if not thousands of unreleased songs, videos and performances. Timeless takes ten. The Purple Rain stage adaptation opens on Broadway in March 2027, and the estate's problem is the one every legacy catalogue eventually faces: how to keep telling the story to people who were not there.

The album is filed under pop, rnb-soul and rock, and its date sits on the release calendar. The circle around those records keeps thinning, with David Z, the producer who worked with Prince, dying earlier this year, and posthumous releases remain a steady presence in our coverage, including Lil Peep's estate putting out Benz Truck Pt. 2.