Thundercat opens Distracted with a dedication to the dead. “Candlelight” names Reggie Andrews, the South LA music teacher who shaped a generation of bassists, singers, and producers before passing. It’s a funeral gesture dressed in rhythm, and the bass enters thick and rounded and already mid-thought, like the song has been going on without you.
Six years is a long time. It Is What It Is came out in 2020, won a Grammy, and became accidental shorthand for a year nobody could process. In the gap, Stephen Bruner got sober after fifteen years of heavy drinking, lost over a hundred pounds, and started boxing. He calls this version of himself Sober Steve. Sober Steve, it turns out, is just as scattered as the old one, only now he’s running the vacuum over the same patch of carpet at midnight and actually feeling it.
The production shift is audible from the first bars. Greg Kurstin, whose resume runs from Adele to Paul McCartney to Foo Fighters, takes the controls for the bulk of the album. Flying Lotus, who executive-produced every previous Thundercat solo record, contributes only two tracks. Kurstin’s fingerprints show up in cleaner song structures, breathers between the bass runs, and choruses that resolve where Lotus might have let them dissolve. The weirder, longer tangents of Drunk and It Is What It Is are mostly gone.
“No More Lies” puts Kevin Parker on the chorus over a groove that has more in common with soft psych-pop than jazz-funk, his voice landing with the resignation of someone who’s been on the road too long and knows it. The bass underneath doesn’t show off. It just holds.
Mac Miller appears on “She Knows Too Much” via recordings made before his death in September 2018, finished with his estate’s blessing and Kurstin’s help. Mac leads the track and he’s unguarded, flipping between wanting this woman and resenting her in the same verse, catching himself mid-cruelty and muttering “man, that was a little harsh,” then circling back with something almost tender. What he offers isn’t nostalgia. He’s just alive in the recording, careless and present. It Is What It Is ended with Thundercat calling “Hey, Mac” into silence and Mac’s voice answering with a single “Woah.” That was an open wound. Here Mac is talking shit to a woman he clearly likes, and Thundercat mostly stays off-mic, playing bass underneath him.
“Great Americans” runs through a full day of functional collapse: waking burnt out, talking to the cats, vacuuming the same spot, not answering calls, circling the apartment until nightfall and realising nothing got done. The outro drops the hook and replaces it with two words: “I’m undiagnosed.” A.D.D. Through the Roof covers similar territory with more warmth, finding something almost hopeful in the inability to sit still. “Pozole,” produced by The Lemon Twigs, strips everything back to piano and voice, and Thundercat asks “who am I?” without the usual joke waiting underneath. The track ends there, in that question, not sitting with it dramatically but just not bothering to answer.
“I Did This to Myself,” which brings in Lil Yachty and Flying Lotus, is where the comedy gets meanest. Thundercat runs through an entire cycle of pursuing someone he knows is wrong for him, documenting every embarrassing calculation, then adds a muttered aside about her anyway. Yachty takes the bit to stranger, crueller places, and the groove keeps rolling like neither of them noticed.
“What Is Left to Say” carries the best single lyric on the record, a Kenny Beats production co-written with The Lemon Twigs: “Feelings are like children in a car / You can put them in the trunk, but let them drive, you won’t go far.” Then, in the same breath, a Star Wars joke. The swerve isn’t deflection exactly. It’s just how his brain moves, and the song is honest enough not to straighten it out. “Anakin Learns His Fate” commits to the metaphor fully, no winking, comparing himself to someone whose partner has painted a monster in her mind and blaming fate for the fallout.
“ThunderWave” with WILLOW is the lightest thing here, a quiet-storm R&B duet where the line “I feel like I’m floating” reads less like elation than low-grade apprehension. “Walking on the Moon” strings together Barbarella and Uhura and Event Horizon with genuine sincerity, using science fiction the way someone else might use flowers: as a vocabulary for closeness.
Kurstin’s production makes room for all of this without flattening it. The pop clarity he brings gives the songs oxygen they’d have lost in Lotus’s weirder arrangements. And Thundercat sounds like he made the trade consciously. The sprawling codas are gone. In their place: a sober 41-year-old making himself laugh about his own patterns, talking to his cats, and asking whether maybe he should start an OnlyFans and show some feet.
The album closes with “You Left Without Saying Goodbye,” which moves slowly and doesn’t explain itself. The arrangement narrows, the harmony gets stranger, the bass becomes more pulse than personality, and the whole thing sits in a kind of dim light.
Distracted will be released on April 3rd via Brainfeeder Records.
Photo – Neil Krug
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