Mike D: the noise comes back before the songs do

Mike D's first solo album is loud, jumpy and generous, and it lands about half the time. Thank You puts the Beastie Boys founder back in front of a band, his two sons included, and asks him to be a frontman at sixty. He gets there in bursts, and between them he is finding his footing in public.

The career is the reason this one matters. Diamond has been one third of the Beastie Boys since the early eighties, from Licensed to Ill in 1986 through seven more albums, until Adam Yauch died of cancer in 2012 and the group stopped. The decade after went to other people's records: production for Portugal. The Man and for Soft Play's Take Control in 2016, plus his Apple Music radio show The Echo Chamber. His own music stayed shut, and he has said that opening a computer file in those years only brought sadness.

The way back ran through his children. Skyler and Davis Diamond make music as Very Nice Person; Mike D turned up at one of their shows, then started playing clubs and festivals with a backing band, 5D, built from his sons, brothers Eddie and Milo Ruscha, and Will Graefe. Sessions with the two of them during the pandemic planted the album. Thank You arrived on Capitol in late August, after four singles: Switch Up, What We Got, True Colors and Crypto. A tour runs from Boston on August 30 to Brussels on November 5.

What the record does with that return is refuse to rap. Verses are replaced by chants, declarations and shouting. Percussion runs relentless underneath, the guitars distort and sear, and the transitions are abrupt by design. His voice stays nasal and thin, and on a few tracks it sits so far under mechanical whirring that the words become another instrument.

True Colors is the whole idea in one song. Distorted guitar, relentless drums, background screams pulled from the hardcore-punk the Beastie Boys came out of, and then the track breaks into an outro that goes quiet and stays quiet. It is the best trick here, and he plays it once.

That's Right is the opposite: industrial rap, his voice pushed under the machinery, every bar nailed down by a snare hit, the whole thing carried on one line, "No matter what I do, I live the way I choose." Make It Stop is the loudest thing on the record: a soapbox delivery with yelps breaking through the verses, sirens and error-notification sounds off the grid, and splintered stabs bouncing off a low end you feel in the floor.

Here We Are is where the album exhales. It carries his best singing on the record and a plain thought worth the space: "And I woke up, felt wrong / Stuck in my head, so I put on a song / Sing that instead." I Don't Care, with its tender indie rock flourishes from his sons, sounds like a band in a room rather than a wall of noise. Thank You, the closer, is the payoff, a love letter to his youth, his fans and his groupmates, sung like a note read aloud.

This is for the people who liked the Beastie Boys because they would not sit in one genre for a whole album. The nearest neighbours now are Young Fathers at their most shouted and the noisy end of Animal Collective. If what you want from Mike D is rapping, this will not give it to you. If you want a man enjoying the noise his kids make, it will.

The weakness is in the writing. The sound is the strongest thing here. Twelve tracks is more than this album has to say, and the chants do not all survive being repeated. On That's Right the vocal sits so deep under the machinery that the best line on the record has to fight to be heard, which is a choice, and a costly one.

Three and a half. A good record from a man who spent a decade not making one, loud and strange enough to be worth the trouble, short of the writing that would have made it more than that. The last song is the one that stays.

The tracklist

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