The Slaughterhouse
2004 studio album by Prince

The Slaughterhouse (Trax from the NPG Music Club Volume 2) is the thirtieth studio album by American recording artist Prince. It was released on March 29, 2004 by NPG Records. The album was released as MP3s through his website, NPG Music Club. The album's title comes from the first line of the song "Silicon", "Welcome 2 the slaughterhouse." The tracks consist of material previously available on the same website back in 2001, although some may have rearrangements of music and/or lyrics. "2045: Radical Man" was released on the soundtrack of Spike Lee's Bamboozled in 2001. "Peace" and "The Daisy Chain" were released as limited edition CD singles during Prince's 2001 Hit n Run Tour. In 2015, the album was released on the Tidal music service. It was made available on other online music services like Spotify and the iTunes Store in 2018.
Even though the album has never been officially released as a CD, there are bootlegs available.
Begin with the source’s own compact description: “The Slaughterhouse” is 2004 studio album by Prince. The dossier treats that line as a proposition to test through Slaughterhouse, studio and album, not as a finished interpretation.
Why this record matters
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Reception evidence should be dated and situated: later canonical status may differ sharply from the work’s initial circulation. The source revision retrieved here is dated May 20, 2026. The linked authority identifier is Q953216. None of the 1 selected statements returned an explicit reference. The first chronological checks are 2004, 2001, 2045 and 2015.
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This entry incorporates text from “The Slaughterhouse” on English Wikipedia. Contributors are listed in the page history. Text is available under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 License. Selected authority identifiers and statements are retrieved from Wikidata under CC0; their references and qualifiers remain part of the verification path.