MIKE D - Thank You

It took Michael “Mike D” Diamond 15 years to recover from the end of one of the greatest arcs in music history, rap or otherwise: the release of the last Beastie Boys album, "Hot Sauce Committee Part Two", followed almost a year later by the tragic passing of Adam "MCA" Yauch, the trio's spiritual leader, taken by cancer at just 47. Without him, Mike D and the group's other surviving longtime member, Adam "Ad-Rock" Horowitz, no longer felt they could carry on, and in truth it probably would have made little sense to do so.
Fifteen years later, in 2026, Mike D has rediscovered his desire to make music after a long absence during which he devoted himself only to occasional production work – including the second album by Soft Play (formerly Slaves), "Take Control". Backed by his children Skyler and Davis Diamond – who form the musical duo Very Nice Person – Mike D has played a number of live shows, and the return to music soon turned into a desire to create something new.

The lineup has since expanded to include a full-fledged backing band, dubbed 5D, featuring brothers Eddie and Milo Ruscha and Will Graefe, musicians from the Los Angeles underground scene. A few months later came the album – the first ever solo record by a member of Beastie Boys, and the first material released by either of the two surviving members since the group's dissolution. A solo debut, incidentally, that for Mike D arrives at the considerable age of 60, and after a career spanning well over 40 years.
The record is called "Thank You", and it's not hard to guess who that gratitude is directed at. But anyone who assumes, starting from the title, that Diamond simply dwells on old memories and past musical glories is very much mistaken. The album, spread across thirteen tracks, certainly doesn't skimp on rap excursions, but it would be wrong to call it a "hip-hop" record, at least in the classic sense of the term. At the same time, for those who know them well, the traces and legacy of Beastie Boys are never absent from these songs.

This isn't, however, the "mainstream" Beastie Boys of "Intergalactic" or "Body Movin'", nor the pseudo-punk naivety of their early days with "Fight For Your Right (To Party)", nor even the more socially engaged Beastie Boys of the 2000s, with poetic songs like "An Open Letter To NYC", their tribute to their city after 9/11. While Mike D certainly carries with him the valuable experience and memories of those triumphs, what emerges on this album is the character of the "other" Beastie Boys: the instrumental, alternative, experimental and noisy ones. Throughout their discography, particularly in the 1990s, the trio always tucked in musical explorations far removed from hip-hop, often losing themselves in pure divertissements drawing on the most disparate influences, in true New York bohemian style, dabbling in jazz, punk and noise through unexpected sonic fragments that have often gone overlooked in their catalogue. In some cases these detours surfaced even in their hits – the obvious example being "Sabotage" – but for the most part, many have forgotten this other side of the trio.

Not Mike D, certainly, who as an instrumentalist contributed on drums, and who on this new record sets out to breathe new life into precisely that second personality of the Beasties. In defiance, one might say, of anyone who was hoping for a nostalgic album, neatly updated to fit contemporary trends, complete with autotune and 808s. Quite the opposite: Mike D makes it clear he couldn't care less about today's scene, that he has no interest in writing songs for TikTok videos, and that expressing his own artistic vision remains, now as then, what matters most to him. The whole tracklist, then, drifts across various alternative tendencies, with Diamond's vocal performances often just one element within a rough, murky sonic landscape, deliberately challenging to listen to and designed to test the listener. That doesn't mean, however, that there's no room among the tracks to wander between different genres and styles: the opener, for instance, the instantly engaging "Switch Up", is enriched by an unexpected jungle rhythm section; the brief electro-rap saga of "Secrets Pt. I" and "Secrets Pt. II" alternates with a decidedly atypical track like "That's Right", an almost atonal song with a heavily distorted sound.

"I Don't Care", on the other hand, is particularly accessible, a track built on an acoustic alt-folk foundation that's at times strikingly psychedelic and eclectic; and, even while exploring his own world, Mike D doesn't shy away from a brief moment of political and social critique (Luddite, perhaps?) on the openly skeptical "Crypto", devoted to cryptocurrency scams and, more broadly, to the rise of techno-fascism.
Also noteworthy is "What We Got", which leans on a lo-fi alt-rock character that harks back to a forgotten Beastie Boys gem like "So What'cha Want", fully in the spirit of the '90s. Equally destabilizing is the alienating, existential electronica of "Here We Are", which makes you forget you're technically listening to a rap artist: "Here we are/ Lost in the dark", sings Mike D, commenting on the dark times we live in, where it's ever harder to make out a safe point of reference or a light to aim for.
Finally, the closing track is left to the title track, which can only look back to the distant past: "We were just kids, figuring it out", says Diamond, recalling those far-off days when the Beastie Boys project was little more than making music among friends. Something that, over the course of their honorable career, never really changed, right up to the end.

That said, while Mike D neither forgets nor has regrets, in this belated solo debut he shows little interest in either reclaiming or rehashing the storied New York trio's "mainstream" legacy, choosing instead – perhaps for the first time in decades – to give the listener, first and foremost, himself. That's why "Thank You" should be heard not primarily as the solo effort of an ex-Beastie Boy, but as the debut record of an artist named Michael Diamond. A debut record that, incidentally and in its own way, can easily be considered a success.

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07/09/2026