31) Lotusflow3r/MPLSound (2009)

For an artist who was happy to put eight or nine songs on an album and call it good, this 2009 behemoth offers a distressing glut of inessential lifestyle music. Lotusflow3r is a triple album that sandwiches in work from protégé du jour Bria Valente. MPLSound fares a bit better as it unravels familiar 1980s and ‘90s tones/tricks. Still, it’s a stultifying slog with few noticeable landmarks.

30) HITnRUN Phase One (2015)

The old adage about not judging a book by its cover doesn’t hold here. The thoughtless clip art—an unfortunately common motif in Prince’s discography—contains 11 fans-only tracks co-written with producer Joshua Welton, who was only 25 when this was released (his wife, Hannah, was the drummer for late-period collaborators 3rdEyeGirl). It isn’t terrible, but if you find yourself hitting this deeply self-referential vein while mining the depths of The Purple One’s catalog, consider going outside for some fresh air and sunlight.

29) Planet Earth (2007)

It’s a pity this superfluous stab at late-2000s relevance didn’t connect as Prince envisioned, since Planet Earth followed the legitimately good, attention-getting 3121 and Musicology. You may remember this as the album that pissed off English record labels when Prince tried to give it away with copies of The Mail on Sunday. “Somewhere Here on Earth,” at least, is a satisfyingly ‘70s-flavored sex ballad that exhibits a falsetto in fine form.

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28) Chaos and Disorder (1996)

A perfunctory release that was meant to help free Prince from his onerous Warner Bros. contract, Chaos and Disorder is only occasionally credible. The title track is an example of its multiple-personality weakness, with solid melodies and performances but ill-considered production. Weirdly, I often think of it as a companion to Sugar’s Beaster, if only because the cover art was similar. (Beaster was better.)

27) Rave Un2 The Joy Fantastic (1999)

This album stings because 1999 should have been the year of Prince, given how much he owned the turn-of-the-millennium in song. Instead, Rave landed like a wounded bird, trying its best to look composed and alert while folding an injured wing under its body. Prince’s glam-bohemian aesthetic sounds as impotent as the curly-fry guitars and tinny beats throughout these 18 tracks, even if hip-hop and alt-rock diehards may be interested in the collaborations with Chuck D, Gwen Stefani, Eve, and Ani DiFranco.

26) HITnRUN Phase Two (2015)

I’ve argued with fans who think this is a Top Ten Prince album. They’re not insane, just under the influence. Truly, this Tidal-released LP (Prince’s last before his death) is better than Phase One, which came out the same year. But how can you listen to songs like “Xtralovable” and “Groovy Potential” with a straight face? The disco affectations, tepid horns, and phoned-in lyrics are charming, at best. I wish this were the equivalent of Bowie’s Blackstar, but it’s just not, and it always sends me back to Art Official Age for closure.

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25) PlectrumElectrum (2014)

I wanted badly to embrace this album when it first came out, given that I was lucky enough to see Prince perform live the preceding year with 3rdEyeGirl as his backing band. Even with the Hendrix-like authority of a killer power-trio propping him up, Prince’s songwriting barely rises to the occasion, sounding like a series of improvisations borne of an inspired practice session. Again, it’s not bad. It’s just… there.

24) 20Ten (2010)

The painfully on-the-nose title and junior high art-class cover doesn’t exactly distinguish this album, which represented another industry experiment in that it arrived for free with various U.K. and European print publications. Still, its proudly synthetic production (see the sumptuous, ‘80s-leaning “Beginning Endlessly”) and savvy sequencing (slow-jams like “Walk in Sand” arrive exactly when they should) have allowed it to age well, missteps aside.

23) The Rainbow Children (2001)

Prince is in full Jehovah’s Witness mode here, having recently converted, but there’s a huge amount of care poured into The Rainbow Children (even if it was markedly disconnected from the national mourning the 9/11 terrorist attacks prompted a couple months before its release). Prince’s skill as an arranger and bandleader is at the fore, with faith-based, spoken-word jazz numbers blending naturally with sweet sentiments such as “She Loves Me 4 Me.” A great Sunday-afternoon platter, provided you can get past the moralizing.

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22) The Black Album (1994)

This is an especially weird and divisive one, having been recorded in 1987 and rumored among fans and collectors to be any number of things (it was unofficially known for awhile as The Funk Bible). Instead, it’s a tight but only occasionally transcendent product of its time, with Prince reacting against hip-hop (“Dead On It”) while penning funky odes to Cindy Crawford (the awkward “Cindy C”). This is one that could have easily remained in label-limbo or the vault, although prior to its release it offered an exciting scavenger hunt for bootleggers.

21) Come (1994)

Come is the Warner Bros. kiss-off Prince was desperately striving for, reinforced by the fact that he changed his name to an unpronounceable symbol around its release. While many of these songs could have appeared on any number of early ‘90s Prince albums, they’re uniformly propulsive and engaging, even as not-so-hidden meta-commentary (people, there’s an electro song called “Loose!”) overshadows the artistry. It also frequently sounds a little too P.M.-Dawn for my tastes (imagine dated, sultry, tambourine-heavy drum machines) although yes, I realize that Prince helped create acts like P.M. Dawn.

20) Crystal Ball / The Truth (1998)

This massive boxed set combined new music, acoustic numbers, and the appreciably self-contained album The Truth in addition to so-so vault material. It’s fine, it’s just a lot to swallow in a sitting (or four) and its litany of head-scratchers (see the studio goof “Cloreen Bacon Skin”) speak to the value of careful pruning. Fans, at least, had a field day connecting the dots on the expansive, kaleidoscopic title track (which had been kicking around since the unreleased Dream Factory) and its many, many (many) spiritual cousins, along with the price-of-admission-justifying “P. Control” remix. The Truth also merits attention due to its mostly acoustic parameters—a space that Prince played in but rarely stayed in, owing to his restless urges and allegiance to studio trickery.

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19) Musicology (2004)

The follow-up to the previous year’s instrumental albums, Xpectation and N.E.W.S. (which are worth hearing, but not included on our vocal-centric album ranking), Musicology bounces, rolls, and struts with admirable ease. “Life ‘O’ the Party” is as concise and winning as many of Prince’s late ‘80s anthems, while “On the Couch” does for the relationship doghouse what sequins do for cheap costumes (i.e. dress them up appealingly). Aside from its pretentious, if genuine, music-education goals, it sounds refreshed and unhurried in a way that few other Prince albums do.

18) Art Official Age (2014)

Prince’s 2016 death hurt all the more because of the promise in this late-period banger. Not so much a return to form as welcome mutation that gallops at Prince’s peak evolutionary rate, Art Official Age is by turns playful, ultra-horny, and epic (see the arena-ready “Art Official Cage,” a play on the title and a bit of gloriously schizophrenic mixing). I frequently get “Breakfast Can Wait” stuck in my head on certain mornings, and that’s all I’ll say about that.

17) 3121 (2006)

This is the other—and better—of Prince’s mid-2000s “comeback” albums, which heralded a flurry of activity culminating in his immortal Super Bowl Halftime performance the year after this was released. Prince can do a lot of this crap in his sleep, but I know dozens of people who would have paid money to watch Prince sleep. What a shocker that Auto-Tune sounds like it was invented for his rubbery pipes (on “Incense and Candles”)! How strange it is that Prince wrote a song called “Love,” which features brain-trickling squirt-fart accents and dirty-rice percussion! There’s very little that’s surprising about this album—except how great it is based on when it was released.

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16) The Gold Experience (1995)

If The Black Album threw some fans for a loop the preceding year, The Gold Experience brought them back around with monochromatic bliss. This is Prince fully indulging his Prince-ness, handling most of the production duties and slipping us gems like “P. Control” (which opens with an excellent, B-movie keyboard blast) and exemplary mid-’90s dance-pop such as “Billy Jack Bitch,” the harmonically precise “Shy,” and urgently sexy “Shhh,” which contains one of my all-time favorite Prince lines: “I’d rather do you after school / like some homework.”

15) Emancipation (1996)

With his freedom from the Warner Bros. contract and his marriage to Mayte Garcia fresh in his mind, Prince dropped the three-disc Emancipation during the same year as Chaos and Disorder and even a film soundtrack (for Spike Lee’s Girl 6, which was mostly previously released material). And yet, you don’t need context to appreciate the rock-solid songwriting and subtle winks (I dig the sound of a baseball crowd cheering during the bass-heavy title track). There’s a lot to digest here, but it hangs together wonderfully, feeling like a family reunion (see the smooth jazz of “Jam of the Year”) as much as a declaration of independence of a famously self-contained man. Hearing him cover “One of Us” (as in, Joan Osborne’s “What if God was one of us?”) also reminds me that Prince is a fucking wizard who can transform treacle into soaring, guitar-driven bliss.

14) Love Symbol (1992)

The title may have been a preview of Prince’s mid-’90s artistic evolution, but the songwriting was all nerve, asserting Prince’s dominance with forceful singles like “Sexy M.F.” and “My Name Is Prince.” He does Michael Jackson better than Michael Jackson on certain tracks, but he does himself just as well, infusing songs like “The Morning Papers” with a tenderness and dynamism MJ rarely mustered. Forget the quasi-conceptual narrative and just dive into songs like “Arrogance,” one minute and 35 seconds of rowdy, free-jazz insanity.

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13) Graffiti Bridge (1990)

Scotch-taped together from various ‘80s studio orphans, Graffiti Bridge fared better as an album than a film (it was both), showcasing songs that even casual Prince listeners would be able to pick out of a radio lineup. Prince is clearly feeling his power in tracks like “Tick, Tick, Bang” and the pleasantly wordy “Joy in Repetition,” and what the album lacks in cohesion it more than makes up with poise and hooks.

12) Parade (1986)

This is the send-off album for The Revolution, the band that served Prince and his fans better than he ever could have dreamed. It’s not quite the rocking reaffirmation that critics at the time hoped for—they didn’t love 1985’s Around the World in a Day, either—but it’s a funky entry in the catalog and an essential document in the history of Prince’s cinematic ambitions, as it provided the soundtrack to Under the Cherry Moon. I still get a little misty when I hear the gentle final track (“Sometimes It Snows in April,” which features crucial Revolution members Wendy Melvoin and Lisa Coleman).

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