Thundercat is back, brave, bold, and weirder than he’s been in years, with Distracted, his first full-length album in six years. I was honestly starting to wonder if the bass wizard, Stephen Bruner, had gotten too comfortable featuring on others’ musical best moments—scoring Kendrick Lamar records, elevating features, being the secret weapon in other people’s albums, that doesn’t require too much digging. But Distracted answers that question with a fat, warm, unmistakable bassline: he’s back and taking names with one of his saddest, yet cosmic, grooving albums in a long time.
Personally, 2017’s Drunk will always be my Thundercat record, probably based on nostalgia, but Distracted really surprised me. He’s taken those weird, jazzy freak-out moments, soloing on the bass like a slap to the face on the opener “Candlelight” and somehow fused it with his blend of funky and funny lyrical fusions. Thundercat processes loss and neurodivergent anxiety the way most of us cannot—by making it groovy and danceable; by dropping a Star Wars reference in the middle of a ballad, by ending the whole album on an Onlyfans feet joke with “You Left Without Saying Goodbye,” so absurd and so perfectly timed that you actually laugh in your kitchen.
He also has a new bag of collabs scattered throughout Distracted, some that on paper don’t really make sense; “No More Lies,” the best Tame Impala feature, or, I’ll say it, the song we’ve heard in a long while. Mac Miller (RIP) makes a posthumous appearance on “She Knows Too Much,” and absolutely crushes it. Flying Lotus comes back along on psychedelic production with Lil Yachty on the brief, classic wet funk Thundercat track “I Did This To Myself.” Lil Yachty only appears in the outro with his codeine-laced bars, but damn does it work. That’s four songs in, and I’m honestly feeling no skips so far, which is rare, since I’ve only found the gems on Thundercat albums, buried in previous years. “Funny Friends” has an overtly sad ASAP Rocky wrapping about lost love, which kind of comes and goes, though.
We’ve got the Lemon Twigs later on the soul ballad, “What Is Left To Say,” which again, makes no sense on paper, but Thundercat and their harmonies do mesh so well. It’s a low-key track on the album, but with every listen, I’m liking it more and more. Some of the solo Thundercat tracks, like “I Wish I Didn’t Waste Your Time,” bang with synth funk energy, “Walking on the Moon,” which has Bruner listing classic sci-fi films under the guise of a love song. Something only a guy like Thundercat could do. Wrapping this up with ’80s action movie “ThunderWave” with WILLOW (who I could give less of a damn about) shines through. Yeah, Distracted is a bunch of flavours of the Thundercat soup.
