The Beastie Boys have a new album, The Mix-Up, coming out within the coming month. You might have heard, you might not have — I didn’t even find out myself until recently, and details just started coming out May 1st. Word is, the album is going to drop June 26th, and will be all-instrumental (!!!), with a later version to have vocals and a wide swath of guest MCs. Sounds interesting. The thought of an instrumental album alone is enough to get my digging-fingers twitching.

Anyway, I was killing more time today looking up Beastie Boys videos on YouTube, when I noticed a new song topping my usual list of search results. It’s here! Something I’m guessing will be the first single off the new Beastie Boys album.

Without further prose, here’s The Rat Cage:

I’ll be the first to say, it’s good, but nothing too killer. minusbaby and I were talking about how songs like these tend to work better on whole albums than as singles, so we’ll see how it fits into the overall scheme of things when the full-length comes out.

Here’s the tracklisting for the new album for now:

1. “B for My Name” – 3:31
2. “14th St. Break” – 3:34
3. “Suco de Tangerina” – 3:17
4. “The Gala Event” – 3:47
5. “Electric Worm” – 3:15
6. “Freaky Hijiki” – 3:05
7. “Off the Grid” – 4:36
8. “The Rat Cage” – 3:37
9. “The Melee” – 3:10
10. “Dramastically Different” – 3:57
11. “The Cousin of Death” – 3:06
12. “The Kangaroo Rat” – 3:28

And for posterity, even though I’m usually not big on AMVs (they usually just fuck up my search results when I’m trying to stream Death Note episodes online), here’s a nicely edited Samurai Champloo video to an even nicer Beastie’s song:

If I were born in another time, I’d like to have been a wandering swordsman. For now, I’ll just keep on as a wandering record slinger.