Was Bruce Springsteen’s ’90s Style Actually Great?

Bruce Springsteen’s Tracks II: The Lost Albums was released last Friday, bestowing upon us 83 new songs by the Boss recorded between 1983 and 2018. Because the vast majority of these numbers were previously unreleased, they make us confront the past head-on—in some ways we may not have anticipated.

As my colleague Alex Pappademas put it when writing about the Streets of Philadelphia Sessions portion of Tracks II, it’s a “positively revelatory album of mournful synth-voice-and-beats…