[1] Recorded at Prince's Paisley Park Studios over a single day, the album was initially available through Prince's NPG Music Club website on June 30, 2003, before becoming widely commercially available on July 29.

In a 2 out of 5 star review, Allmusic reviewer William Ruhlman criticized the album as directionless, stating "The listener, who will have to be a particularly rabid aficionado of all things Prince to be interested, must throw out all expectations and simply revel in the joy of hearing the musician and his cohorts experiment with relaxed musical textures for 56 minutes.

"[1] In a positive review for Jazz Times Lucy Tauss summarized "exploratory and evocative, N.E.W.S.

[7] Stereogum ranked it 20th out of 30 main Prince albums released by 2014, stating "there's no pretending that this isn't for the diehards primarily, or that it's even a coherent collection, but it's great to see a man with so many ideas let some new ones loose.

"[12] In a 2014 feature which ranked all Prince albums to date, American magazine Metro Weekly rated it as #36 out of 38 Prince albums, calling it "a 56-minute exercise in tedium", with only Xpectation (2003) and Kamasutra (1998) placed behind.