Tracks II: The Lost Albums [Box Set]

This collection is a breathtaking gift that Springsteen acolytes will cherish. [Summer 2025, p.84]

Tracks II is overpowering in its sheer abundance — you can spend entire weeks exploring these albums. It’s loaded with songs that any other artists would have jumped at the chance to release—but not this guy, because good as they were, they just didn’t fit into his overarching plan of the lifelong story he wanted to tell.

Tracks II: The Lost Albums never sounds like a box full of also-ran material – in fact, several of these LPs are decidedly superior to most of his work of the 2000s and 2010s – and makes the case that Bruce Springsteen is a more eclectic and ambitious artist than he sometimes lets on.

On Inyo, he sings translations of Spanish poetry, tells the tale of the California water wars, and cites in the credits a book called The Mexican Corrido: A Feminist Analysis. While these selections might make Tracks II sound like a fans-only buffet of curios, the magic is in how much it all plays to his strengths, how intuitively these outliers stand among the classics.

There’s obviously going to be more in here for die-hard devotees than the passing generalist, and the sheer size of the release makes it far from the ideal jumping off point for a newcomer. However, it is an undertaking of rare unfiltered insight that allows those willing to stay the course to get under the skin of a true genius in a way that, had the 1990s gone a different way, may never have been possible.