A Long Time Ago or Maybe Yesterday

Prince “X’s Face”

Prince’s new record – for now only available on the streaming service Tidal – is the most consistently excellent album he’s put out in some time. I know that something like every fourth Prince release gets hype like that, but HitNRun Phase One is sexy and strange in a way that he’s mostly avoided over the past decade or two. A lot of this is owed to the fact that this is a very rare record in which Prince is in full collaboration with a producer, Joshua A. M. Welton, who gets co-producer and co-songwriting credits. Prince sticks to vocals, guitar, and bass on this album, and allows Welton to go wild with contemporary synths and beats. It’s interesting to hear Prince concede keyboard and beat programming, two elements of his sound that he’s completely mastered, to a younger musician. There’s not a lot that Welton does that would seem out of place on a Prince record, but he reconnects Prince with a synth-based edginess that was once at the center of his sound. Welton pushes Prince away from fussiness and towards an off-kilter funk that perfectly suits the more playful and seductive aspects of his voice. That really comes through in “X’s Face,” which plays his falsetto against a lurching, nearly abrasive bass synth part. I think it would’ve fit in pretty well with the funky digital minimalism of the Sign O the Times era.

Get it from Tidal.