Prince estate to release new album featuring unreleased work

NEW YORK, USA – A new Prince album of mostly unreleased recordings will drop in June, the estate managing his music archives announced Thursday, April 25.

The 15-track album entitled Originals will begin streaming exclusively on the paid subscription platform Tidal on June 7, Prince’s birthday, with wider digital and physical release on June 21.

Featuring music recorded primarily in the 1980s, the album includes 14 previously unreleased tracks and a number of demo versions Prince penned for fellow artists, including “Manic Monday” which ultimately soared onto the pop charts as part of The Bangles’ 1986 album Different Light.

Originals will also include a version of “The Glamorous Life,” a 1984 dance hit he wrote for his protege Sheila E, and “Nothing Compares 2 U,” which Irish singer-songwriter Sinead O’Connor brought to the masses in 1990.

It is the second posthumous album from Prince – who died suddenly in April 2016 at age 57 of a fentanyl overdose – after last year’s intimate Piano and a Microphone 1983, the first album from his estate featuring exclusively material from his mythic bank of unreleased work, the Vault.

News of a second album follows the estate’s announcement this week that prolific Prince’s unfinished memoir, The Beautiful Ones, will be released in October.

Prince – one of the most influential but elusive figures in music – became an international sensation in the 1980s as he popularized the Minneapolis Sound of danceable funk, with 1984’s Purple Rain often hailed as one of the greatest albums of all time. – Rappler.com