Obsessive fans of The Boss are going to have a busy summer.
This week, Bruce Springsteen announced that he'd be filling in some of the longstanding gaps in his catalog by putting out seven albums of previously unreleased music. The box set, out June 27 and titled Tracks II: The Lost Albums, collects 83 songs that were recorded across four decades, ending with an unreleased album from 2018 called Perfect World. On Thursday, he shared a booming rock song from that album titled "Rain in the River."
"'The Lost Albums' were full records, some of them even to the point of being mixed and not released," Springsteen said in a press release. "I've played this music to myself and often close friends for years now. I'm glad you'll get a chance to finally hear them. I hope you enjoy them."
This is the second time Springsteen has released a collection of unreleased material. The first was in 1998, with the box set Tracks. The new collection out this year includes Faithless, a film soundtrack for a movie that was never made, and Streets of Philadelphia Sessions, which build on his 1994 Academy Award-winning song written for the movie Philadelphia. There's also a country album, Somewhere North of Nashville, the title of which shares its name with a song that eventually appeared on Springsteen's 2019 album Western Stars, and an "orchestra-driven, mid-century noir"-inspired album Twilight Hours.
The box set also includes a significant collection of songs titled the LA Garage Sessions '83, which chronicle the fruitful songwriting period in between Springsteen's 1982 album Nebraska, on which the rock star ditched his full band set-up in favor of working alone with stripped down, home recording techniques, and his commercial pop breakthrough, 1984's Born in the U.S.A. Unofficial versions of those lo-fi demos, many of which preview Springsteen's later incorporation of drums and synthesizers, have been traded by fans for years, with hopes of Springsteen eventually releasing them.
Those recordings will give insight into a period of Springsteen's career when the artist was trying out new recording processes. "It seems like there was still some solo project or solo way of recording that he was still working through," says Lauren Onkey, music professor at George Washington University. "I think people are going to be really intrigued to see why did he keep waiting to put out Born in the U.S.A.?"
For the last 10 years, Springsteen has focused on looking back at his life and legacy, releasing a 2016 memoir, Born to Run, and a career-spanning residency on Broadway. A biopic titled Deliver Me from Nowhere, starring The Bear actor Jeremy Allen White as Springsteen during the process of recording Nebraska, is also set for release this year.
In a promo video for Tracks II, Springsteen says the box set will answer some outstanding questions about his career. "I often read about myself as having had some kind of lost period in the '90s," he says. "Not really … really I was working the whole time."
Copyright 2025 NPR
