Paul’s Boutique by Beastie Boys

Paul's Boutique, the Beastie Boys' second album, hit the shelves on Capitol on July 25, 1989, and anyone expecting Licensed to Ill Part Two got a crate-digger's fever dream instead. Ad-Rock, MCA and Mike D spent two years building it in Los Angeles with the Dust Brothers, at Matt Dike's apartment and the Record Plant, out of a blizzard of samples from funk, soul, rock and jazz, stacked so thick that the three voices come tumbling out of a wall of other people's records.

Capitol barely pushed it, and it never came close to the sales of the 1986 debut, though it still went gold that year and double platinum a decade on. The critics came around: it has been called hip-hop's Sgt. Pepper, hailed as a cornerstone of sampledelia and golden age hip-hop, and it keeps turning up on lists of the greatest albums ever made.

Written with AI assistance from RockLists chart data, MusicBrainz and Wikipedia.