Nearly a decade after Prince’s death, the vault is still giving. The Prince Estate has announced Timeless, a 10-song collection of previously unreleased recordings pulled from across the artist’s entire career, arriving August 28 through the estate’s partnership with Sony’s Legacy Recordings, per Variety.
“Spanning every phase of Prince’s illustrious career, from 1977 to 2016.”
That is exactly what the album does. Its 10 tracks reach back to I Am You, recorded in 1977, and stretch all the way to How Come You Don’t Call Me Anymore, a live take from his 2016 Piano and a Microphone tour that Prince’s collaborators once considered for release during his final days. Two of the songs are alternate versions of previously released material, while the rest are entirely unreleased.
Opening the Hallowed Vault
The scale of what the estate is drawing from is hard to overstate. Prince’s vault was so vast that a deluxe boxed set focused just on his 1987 classic Sign O’ the Times filled eight CDs and still did not contain even half of that album’s outtakes.
Timeless is the first album project of unreleased material initiated under the estate’s current management, led by L. Londell McMillan and Charles Spicer Jr. It follows a years-long impasse in which a Netflix deal had given the streaming giant exclusive access to the vault, stalling new releases; when that film fell apart in early 2025, the estate’s social accounts marked the moment with the message “The Vault Has Been Freed.”
Fans have already gotten previews. With This Tear, a complete solo performance recorded at Paisley Park in November 1991, was released in April to mark the 10th anniversary of Prince’s death, and Stone, a 1995 song, arrived as a single with the album announcement in June. The album will be released on CD, standard black vinyl and a direct-to-consumer exclusive Purple Marble Vinyl.
Why It Matters
For Prince’s legions of fans, Timeless is a rare chance to hear the Purple One across every chapter of his career in a single sitting, from teenage funk upstart to Paisley Park icon. It also signals that the estate’s notoriously slow-moving release pipeline is finally open again after years of legal and contractual limbo. Whether it is a one-off or the start of a steady stream from the vault, Timeless lands Friday as a reminder that one of pop’s most prolific geniuses still has plenty of surprises left.
