As the title suggests, The Vault is a collection of older tracks, most of them composed between 1985 and 1986, and was recorded at the same time as 1996’s Chaos and Disorder, but only released in 1999 as part of Prince’s ongoing contract obligations with Warner Brothers. It was also affixed to his next studio album, Rave Un2 The Joy Fantastic, in the same way that The Truth was affixed to Crystal Ball. In other words, it’s one of Prince’s last great purges of his unreleased material of the 80s and 90s, a footnote to the end of his Warner Brothers saga.

Nevertheless, The Vault is radically different from both Crystal Ball and The Truth in spirit – in fact, it departs from most of Prince’s albums from this era. One of the strengths of Prince’s “archival” studio albums was that their off-the-cuff production and relative brevity allowed him to achieve a cohesion often missing on his more sprawling, grander statements. The Vault culminates that tendency, since it has the most unified sound of all his 90s albums, along with The Gold Experience and Emancipation, both of which significantly impact its style.

For here we see Prince shifting fully into jazz rock (or perhaps more accurately drawing on the jazz rock impulses that lurked around the fringes of his 80s peak). The first half is a sequence of smooth numbers while the second half feels largely improvised, starting with a minute-long spoken word track. My favourite track was “She Spoke 2 Me,” which moves seamlessly from funk to jazz fusion to straight jazz, gathering all of Prince’s different iterations of smoothness into one silky, sinuous whole. This track, like so much of the album, draws heavily on the Steely Dan of Aja and Gaucho in its noodly instrumental solos and luxurious synth-funk textures.

Surprisingly, then, I found The Vault one of Prince’s most enjoyable and consistent releases of the 90s. It doesn’t in the least feel like a collection of out-takes, partly because its expansive fusion means that everything comes together in direct proportion to its disparate fringes. I’d even venture to say that the opening half is up there with his very best albums, which makes sense given that much of this material is harvested from his classic period. Smooth even when it funks hard, and funky even at its smoothest, it’s a genuine Prince gem.