N.E.W.S. is the twenty-seventh studio album by American recording artist Prince. It was released on June 30, 2003, by NPG Records. The album is the second instrumental album released under Prince's own name, containing four tracks of 14 minutes duration each.
The album is the lowest-selling Prince album released to date, with just 30,000 copies sold, but it did become a top-ten hit on the Billboard Internet sales chart, and garnered a Grammy nomination for Best Pop Instrumental Album. The album artwork folded out into a ninja star. Produced by Prince, the album is credited as "Directed By Prince".
The track "West" was included on the 2018 compilation Anthology: 1995–2010.
Style and composition
The album is an all-instrumental album in the new-age
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The album received mostly negative reviews from critics, with several critics noting the album's lack of cohesion.
In a 2 out of 5 star review, Allmusic reviewer William Ruhlman criticized the album as directionless, stating "The listener, who will have to be a particularly rabid aficionado of all things Prince to be interested, must throw out all expectations and simply revel in the joy of hearing the musician and his cohorts experiment with relaxed musical textures for 56 minutes. Of course, no one else needs to bother."
In a 2014 feature which ranked all Prince albums to date, American magazine Metro Weekly rated it as #36 out of 38 Prince albums, calling it "a 56-minute exercise in tedium", with only Xpectation (2003) and Kamasutra (1998) placed behind.
Track listing
Personnel
Band
- Jeremy Gavin – art design
Production
- Jess Sutcliffe – engineer
- Joseph Lepinski – musical technician
- Takumi – musical technician
Charts
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|+Chart performance for N.E.W.S.
! scope="col"| Chart (2003)
! scope="col"| Peak<br /> position
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! scope="row"| US Top Internet Albums (Billboard)
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