Mike D: Thank You, a debut that moves faster than it lands

Mike D released Thank You on August 27 through Capitol Records. Thirteen tracks, 39 minutes, the first album under his own name. It exists after years in which he could not make music at all, following Adam "MCA" Yauch's death in 2012. He has said what that felt like: "I'd open a computer file, and I'd just feel sadness." The record came out of sessions he played with his sons Skyler and Davis during the pandemic. Those two make music together as Very Nice Person.

Tempo is what it gets right. Nothing here sits still, and the best move is structural: "Secrets" is split across a 1:24 part one and a 3:27 part two, a fragment handed off to a finished song. The whole record runs on that method, short bursts of breakbeat and post-punk stacked one after another. "That's Right" is over in 2:08. The pressing credits tag it breakbeat, hip hop, indie rock and post-punk, and that collision is what keeps 39 minutes from feeling like a lecture.

The problem is that momentum is doing work a hook should be doing. "Make It Stop" (2:55), "Crypto" (2:40), "Back to Start" (3:08) and "It's Time" (2:49) pass through the back half without leaving a shape behind, and the record's most reliable gesture is the hard stop. The lines attached to the record carry the real subject: "No matter what I do, I live the way I choose", and "Stuck in my head, so I put on a song / Sing that instead". Both are better than the music around them. A record about getting back to work should not be at its most convincing when the man stops playing.

That is a 3.5, and the distance to a 4 is one track a stranger would ask about by name. A 4 needs a hook you can hum back the next morning; Thank You does not have one I could point to. A 3 would be a record still trapped in the silence it came out of, and this is not that: "Switch Up" opens it clean, and the 3:36 title track ends by saying the thing and stopping. The reentry is real. The songs are still catching up to it.

The tracklist

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