It’s hard to imagine, with just seven studio albums and a few assorted singles released during his lifetime, that any of John Lennon’s solo work could go essentially forgotten, but the ridiculously underappreciated Mind Games is just that.

Released in the wake of Lennon and wife Yoko Ono’s agitprop Sometime In New York City, which led many fans to wonder what was going on with Lennon—and the always paranoid Nixon Administration to brand Lennon a political enemy and have him followed by the FBI and his phones tapped—Mind Games did respectable sales numbers upon release in 1973, but hardly those befitting a former-Beatle.

“When Mind Games came out, as a fan back then, my initial reaction was of being a little bit disappointed,” recalls Rob Stevens, who has acted as Yoko Ono’s archivist for decades and who worked on the new box set, Mind Games (The Ultimate Collection), out now. “But upon the years passing, what I found was that, in retrospect, it wasn’t the John Lennon I wanted to hear. Because it’s confessional, it’s emotional, it’s asking for forgiveness, it’s giving forgiveness.”

Predating Bob Dylan’s Blood On The Tracks and the rise of the popular confessional recording artist by more than a year, Mind Games can now be appreciated as ahead of its time.

Of course, Lennon had released Imagine just two years prior, but in the years since The Beatles had split, he’d also released a string of avant-garde albums with Ono, as well the stark, haunting Plastic Ono Band, while his former bandmates were topping the charts—in 1973 Paul McCartney released “My Love” and Band On The Run, George Harrison put out “Give Me Love (Give Me Peace On Earth)” and Living In The Material World and Ringo Starr released “Photograph” and his self-titled album, featuring all of the former Beatles. It feels obvious now that the public had a serious case of John and Yoko fatigue.

Mind Games (The Ultimate Collection), the third in a series of deep dives into the making of Lennon’s solo works, which previously highlighted 1970s Plastic Ono Band and 1971s Imagine. seeks to rectify things. And, unlike so many box sets, which too often feel like cash grabs by legacy artists and their labels, this one more than lives up to the hype.