If the garage-funk/skatepunk hybridization of Check Your Head steered the Beastie Boys’ rep from hip-hop misfits to alt-rock-conversant crossover, its followup took that stylistic repositioning into deeper, more ambitious terrain. Ill Communication is the first album in their career to actually feel like an expansive reiteration of its predecessor rather than an abrupt left turn; most famously, the Ad-Rock-screamed assault of the smash hit “Sabotage” took the punk-rap power-trio approach of “So What’cha Want” and maximized it to a hilariously intense extent. (What countless nu-metal copyists failed to pick up on was the Beasties’ ability to make that embattled freakout energy sound as playful as it was cathartic.) Their further excursions into Money Mark-abetted instrumental funk tightened up the band’s Meters-oid jamming (the cosmically sloppy “Futterman’s Rule”; the dusty Rhodes of “Ricky’s Theme”; the wah-wah’d dawnbreak reverie of “Transitions”) and primed a whole generation of ’90s teens for the following decade’s Dap-Toned revivalism. And their hardcore moves are, while pared back, even funnier — two cuts, the 57-second outburst “Tough Guy” and the breakdown-bolstered “Heart Attack Man,” which dedicate a Cro-Mags amount of intensity to grievances around big stupid asshole oafs. But Ill Communication shines because it also expands past Check Your Head's alt moves by reconnecting to the their lyrical side as rappers, whether it’s the License to Ill-rep-refuting (and cool-hunter namedropping) make-good “Sure Shot,” the modernized-for-’94 old-school update “Root Down,” or the lighthearted hedonism of the Q-Tip-featuring, hot-mic-swapping “Get It Together."

– Nate Patrin