20Ten (2010)
1. Compassion
2. Beginning Endlessly
3. Future Love Song
4. Sticky Like Glue
5. Act of God
6. Lavaux
7. Walk in Sand
8. Sea of Everything
9. Everybody Loves Me
10.Laydown
By the time 20Ten emerged in 2010, Prince had long since dispensed with conventional album releases. This one, true to late-period form, was distributed not through stores or digital platforms, but as a covermount giveaway in select European publications. A physical disc, inserted in weekend newspapers. Even by his standards, it was an esoteric move. But then again, so much of his latter output seemed designed more to confuse than to communicate. The tragedy of 20Ten, however, is not the distribution. It’s the music.
There is, it must be said, a surface-level professionalism throughout. The arrangements are clean, the instrumentation competent, and there is no trace of the genre-defying eccentricities that defined his more unrestrained periods. He appears on the cover as himself—not a symbol, not an abstraction—and one might reasonably infer a return to form. But this is where the illusion ends.
The first three tracks flirt with promise. Compassion kicks things off with a brisk, synth-led groove that nods vaguely in the direction of 1999. Future Soul Song delivers a textbook Prince ballad—lush, melancholic, and melodically sturdy. Beginning Endlessly, the strongest of the set, embraces a more futuristic palette and suggests a flicker of the old ambition. These three tracks offer fleeting hope. Then the descent begins.
What follows is perhaps best described as perfunctory. Tracks blur into one another with alarming speed, each one indistinct from the next. There are no sharp turns, no moments of surprise or catharsis. At times, it feels as though Prince is recycling his own tropes—reassembling past ideas without infusing them with new vitality. The production, while technically precise, is curiously lifeless. There is no grit, no grain, no spark.
The most damning critique is that it all feels indifferent. Not bad, exactly—Prince was too skilled to produce outright failures—but uninspired. The songs drift by like sketches waiting to be coloured in. Whatever internal urgency once drove his best work is absent here, replaced by a sense of going through the motions. It is the sound of an artist who seems, at least temporarily, to have lost interest in his own output.
Clocking in at under 40 minutes, 20Ten ends almost as soon as it begins—a mercy, perhaps. There is no grand finale, no standout closing statement. It simply fizzles out. And that, more than anything, underscores its lack of impact. It is a rare Prince album that leaves virtually no trace.
In hindsight, 20Ten occupies the unfortunate category of being not just forgettable, but almost invisible. It neither challenges nor delights. It simply exists, and then disappears.
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