HitnRun: Phase Two (2015)
1. Baltimore
2. Rock and Roll Love Affair
3. 2Y.2D.
4. Look at Me, Look at U
5. Stare
6. Xtralovable
7. Groovy Potential
8. When She Comes
9. Screwdriver
10.Black Muse
11.Revelation
12.Big City
The final release of original material issued during Prince’s lifetime, Hit n Run: Phase Two stands now not just as a studio album, but as an unintentional farewell. Issued quietly in late 2015, just months before his sudden and untimely death, it carries none of the overt sentimentality that might accompany a knowing final statement. And yet, in its restraint, clarity, and surprising warmth, it offers a fitting coda to one of popular music’s most restless, unpredictable careers.
Despite being billed as a follow-up to 2015’s Hit n Run: Phase One, the similarities are largely superficial. The sleeve design mimics its predecessor, though Prince appears here in a far more conventional pose, his eyewear no longer adorned with the fly-like eccentricities that often marked his visual identity in the 2010s. The music, too, is of a different character—less processed, less frenetic, and significantly more organic.
Where Phase One felt weighed down by overproduction, samples, and studio trickery, Phase Two strips much of that away in favor of live instrumentation and traditional arrangements. This is Prince the bandleader, not the studio alchemist. Horns feature prominently, melodies breathe, and the tracks are given space to settle into their grooves. It is, in many ways, the most straightforward album he had released in years—and the most listenable.
The record opens with Baltimore, a topical track responding to ongoing racial tensions and civil unrest in America. Its lyrics are pointed, but the music remains breezy—almost deceptively so. It walks a delicate line between protest song and pop single, and if it lacks the righteous fury of earlier political material like Sign o’ the Times, it compensates with clarity and optimism. It's an unusual tone for such content, but it lands with quiet confidence.
Elsewhere, Prince dips comfortably into the funk and R&B stylings that long defined his catalog. Xtralovable, Black Muse, and 2Y.2D. all flirt with the dance floor, and while none of them reach the dizzying heights of his 1980s output, they are tightly constructed and rhythmically satisfying. His voice—slightly weathered now—sits comfortably within the mix, and the arrangements recall the sophistication of his New Power Generation years.
That said, the album is not without its longueurs. At 57 minutes, it occasionally drifts into pleasant filler—tracks that charm in the moment but evaporate quickly thereafter. There’s nothing here that startles or reinvents, but there’s also nothing that offends. For an artist once defined by excess and experimentation, this is Prince in rare form: measured, focused, and—dare one say it—content.
In retrospect, Phase Two feels like the album he needed to make, both for himself and for his listeners. It eschews the overblown conceptualism of records like Art Official Age and the maximalist overload of Phase One, opting instead for a kind of closing statement—unaware though he may have been. There’s a calmness to it, a sense of reflection, and a lack of pretense that now reads as elegiac.
It’s unlikely that this will ever be considered a cornerstone of Prince’s catalog, and in truth, it doesn’t need to be. It functions more as a gentle epilogue than a final chapter. And for all its imperfections, it is comforting to know that, before the curtain fell, Prince returned once more to the fundamentals—songcraft, soul, and sincerity.
He left quietly, but the echoes remain.
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