Prince expressed himself comprehensively. When you put on one of his albums, you were doing more than just hearing a collection of songs — you were stepping into a carefully constructed world with its own colors, shapes, characters, and emotional narratives.

Prince released 39 albums in his lifetime. Each one was assembled with careful consideration of not just its sound and lyrical messages, but how it was presented to the world. One of Prince’s bandmates told me that they knew when a new album was coming because Prince would walk into rehearsal with a new hairdo. That adds up to 39 different ’dos accompanying these eras, along with fresh outfits, photos, symbols, color palettes, fonts, and set designs. At least once, he even painted his entire house to signify that a new recording era was beginning.

“We live in a singles-driven market, but I come from the old school and making albums,” Prince told Arsenio Hall in 2014, reflecting on his creative process. He stressed how important it was to him that songs were grouped together cohesively. “One of the things we do is wait until we have other songs with our favorites. That’s why it takes a long time,” he said.

For an artist who committed so much of his life to prolifically generating ideas and rendering them with meticulous precision, the conception of this new posthumous album, Timeless, falls short. In a press release, the album is presented as “the first Prince release curated to span every major era of his career,” trumpeting the fact that it would take listeners from Prince’s first sessions as a teenager to one of his final concerts.

The album begins in 1977 with the scorching, funky “I Am You,” an album highlight. It peaks again toward the middle with the emotional, sweeping ballad “With This Tear,” and the NPG-horn-driven “Calabama” and “The Guilty Ones.” But by the time the audience applause fades out on the live track “How Come U Don’t Call Me Anymore?” from Prince’s final tour, only 41 minutes over 10 tracks have tick-tick-banged past.

At the risk of sounding like one of those spoiled Prince fans — who the current management of his estate seems to resent — when the album ended, I couldn’t help but think, Is that all there is?

Before I hit play on the album again, I searched to see what I was missing. I reread the press release. I went to his social media. I looked for something, anything, to explain why a four-decade career that generated so many releases had been reduced to 10 short, erratically compiled vault tracks. But absent any liner notes, interviews with associates, lyrics, archival imagery, or other contextual clues typically included in posthumous releases, listeners are left to draw their own conclusions. (In this life, you’re on your own.)

On my second and third pass through, I started jumping around and listening to the songs out of order, and the experience increased dramatically. The album is called Timeless, but listeners with even a passing knowledge of Prince’s immense body of work will immediately hear connections to the eras when each recording was made. Limitless would be a more fitting title. Prince broke through countless barriers when he was alive, and the raw talent showcased across these 10 tracks ultimately transcends the album’s befuddling presentation.

It’s poignant and bittersweet to hear Prince in 1977 at Sound 80, where he recorded the demos to For You with the now-departed David “Z” Rivkin. Timeless’s mixing and mastering engineer Chris James mixed “I Am You” expertly, driving home the reason why everyone in teenage Prince’s orbit was shocked that his demos were recorded by a single person. It left me yearning for James’s golden touch on the complete For You sessions, and mournful that Rivkin is no longer here to share memories of that nascent period of Prince’s artistry.

“Tick, Tick, Bang” is familiar to fans as a track on Graffiti Bridge, and Timeless offers a much earlier, spunkier recording. The 1981 demo would sound right at home on the 1999 box set, when Prince was dividing himself into three creative identities and simultaneously writing work for Vanity 6, The Time, and himself.

“Heaven” skips like a rock over the entire 1999 and Purple Rain era and lands for a moment in the dreamy Wendy & Lisa era, while “I Wonder” could have been a standout track on Graffiti Bridge if Prince hadn’t shelved it at the end of the ’80s.

The crown jewels of Timeless come in a sequence toward the end. Perhaps because of James’ mixing — or perhaps because of overdubs that Prince added later, but aren’t noted in the album’s scant credits — the run of “Calabama,” “The Guilty Ones,” and “Bestest Friend” sound like they could have made it onto a late-career Prince album with his NPG Hornz like HitnRun, Phase Two. Like all good Prince songs, it makes you wonder what he would have done with these songs live, where he would have stretched each song into a 10- or 15-minute funk jam.

The cover of Timeless is an altered image of Prince in concert, his incomparable outline rendered into a silhouette with bright splashes of blue and pink. It’s difficult, at times like these, not to feel like Prince is slipping out of view entirely, as this selection of songs is scattered into the wind of digital streaming and endless video loops on social media. With an album geared toward neither Prince’s steadfast fans nor casual listeners, it’s hard to say what the impact of Timeless will be beyond its “global release party” — which fans were encouraged to throw themselves, wherever they are in the world. Without much curatorial context for this release, all we have is what we already had, right? Prince’s eternal voice, and each other.