Thank You

It took fourteen years and a lot of ruminating, but Mike D made the plunge of finally reintroducing one of the Beastie Boys’ unmistakable voices into music this year for the first time since Adam Yauch’s death in 2012. In many ways, Thank You is less a grand artistic re-entrance than a giddy, comparatively low-stakes jam sesh, an oldhead riffing with his sons’ band and cutting loose with some post-genre beat weirdness that makes like dad rock for Grand Royal-besotted Xennials. Anyone who remembers Ad Rock futzing around with drummer Amery Smith for their synth-punk side project BS2000 will probably catch a similar spirit here — to say nothing of the playfully aggro-joyous vibe of everything else they did in the late ‘90s from Hello Nasty to Mike’s guest spots with UNKLE and Handsome Boy Modeling School — and some of that seems by design. Opener “Switch Up” is the best example of this throwback appeal; its groove shuffling between drum’n’bass and big beat to get at its glitch-punk common denominator while it careens through how to deal with its state of self-aware confusion (“Need to get reception/Need some self reflection/Try to take a beat cause/I can’t take the message”). But as its sound expands to spirit-of-‘98 art-school boom bap (“What We Got”), fizzing Reznorisms (“That’s Right”), new wave booty bass (“Make It Stop”) and poolside stoner indie-pop (“Back to Star”), it pulls together a sense of leg-stretching wandering, an oldhead realizing his stylistic fascinations have a new generation waiting for them. It’s also one of those curious cases where the lyrics’ simplicity is to the album’s benefit: even at their most pop-culture-damaged and referential, the Beasties had a thing for being more emphatically understandable than confoundingly esoteric; if that means blunt-force simple hooks like “Got to run/lots of fun” (“True Colors”) or “I got secrets, but I’m happy/Might cry, might laugh” (“Secrets Pt. I”), it’s coming from the same place that makes the title track’s recollection of his early youthful energy so immediately affecting. At age 60, Mike raps (and hollers and mumbles), filtered and without, not like someone trying to prove not that he’s cool but that he’s collected. The calm can come some other time.