It has been fifteen long years since the final Beastie Boys’ album, Hot Sauce Committee Part II dropped and, in the intervening years, neither Mike D nor Ad-Rock has shown much inclination to produce a new album, although both have kept busy with music-related endeavours. Nevertheless, the return of Mike D to the musical frontline has been one of the better surprises 2026 has had to offer and, on Thank You, he offers up a surprisingly cohesive collection of songs that nods to the storied and eclectic past of the Beasties, while placing a fresh spin on the sometimes-chaotic style of hip hop that was their stock in trade.
Honestly, from the moment the stuck groove jazzbo noise of Switch Up lands, it feels as if we’re back where we belong, Mike D warming up with a series of repeated lines before finally letting loose with a more free-flowing rhyme. Set against a soundtrack that combines the Beastie Boys, Beck, and Tricky, it’s a brilliantly eclectic opening to the album and it makes you realise just how much you’ve missed the wide-eyed innovation that three MCs and one DJ brought to the party throughout the 90s. Next up, the surprisingly grungy What We Got cruises off the back of a heavily distorted riff, the drums displaying a Bonham-esque sensibility that was with the Beasties at least from when they sampled When The Levee Breaks. It’s a massive sounding track and, while there are moments when you miss the interjections of Ad-Rock and the late, much-missed MCA, it’s also impressive just how easily Mike D fills out the sound. The track wraps up in a lovely moment of airy psychedelia before the shuffling beat of True Colors finds Mike dipping his toes in similar waters to The Chemical Brothers circa Let Forever Be.
The surprises keep coming as the dark pulse of That’s Right shows that Mike D has learned some new tricks in the past fifteen years. Set to a pared-back, almost mechanistic backdrop, it’s a bruising robo-funk that owes as much to Nine Inch Nails as it does to Paul Epworth. Much the same could be said of Secrets Pt I & II, although it trades its dirty, seductive groove mid-song for something more akin to the hazy electronic noise of Toro Y Moi, with psych-tinged backing vocals swirling ever louder through the mix. The final part of this mid-album triptych rings the changes once again, with Mike D nodding to Beck’s weird hip-hop/melancholia mashups on I Don’t Care. Defiantly lo-fi, it seems to slowly swell from an inauspicious start to encompass a truly beautiful melody.
With the album hurtling past, Make It Stop emerges as heavy-duty hip-hop, complete with woah-oah backing vocals and a massive beat that nods to So What Cha Want, had it been produced by the Dust Brothers. Meanwhile, Crypto wrongfoots the listener by opening in the same ilk before heading down a twisted path that takes in punk, funk, rock and industrial, all in just three little minutes. In contrast, Here We Are is a lovely psych-pop piece that exists in a multi-hued world that’s all its own, as does Back To The Start, which takes that whole Flaming Lips vibe a step further, showcasing a surprisingly catchy, if gloriously skronky pop side to Mike D.
The final two tracks bring Thank you full circle. The first of these, It’s Time, emerges from a comically 80s backdrop, introduces a monstrous beat, and never looks back. As with the opening pieces, it’s a kaleidoscopic track that finds Mike D and his collaborators skipping across genres at will. The album closes with its title track, a sweetly simple acoustic track that ditches much of the electronica in favour of a gently nostalgic retelling of Mike D’s earliest years as a musician and a heartfelt thank you for everything that followed. All the more poignant for its direct address, it makes for an emotional finale to a most welcome return.
In the 90s, when the Beastie Boys were at their peak, it wasn’t one rhyme, or one track that made them so special. It was their sense of adventure. To listen to a Beastie Boys record now, is to find yourself surprised at just how contemporary they still sound, largely because they were never tethered to any one genre. What started as jazz could very easily end as hardcore punk, and even on the more straightforward tracks, the band’s production sense was nearly always on the money.
Happily, Mike D has captured a good deal of that scattershot innovation here. Across the album, you’ll find everything from hip hop to jazz, with everything from psych and punk along the way. It’s music you assumed didn’t really get made any more, certainly not on a large scale, simply because the sheer wealth of music available has forced most artists to nail their colours to a given genre mast. It’s glorious to hear and we can only hope that Thank You is the start of something new and beautiful from an artist whom we’ve missed perhaps more than we realised. 9/10
