Thundercat Is Just as ‘Distracted’ as You Are

I
t should be some solace that even the musician Thundercat is finding it hard to focus these days. His fifth studio album, aptly titled Distracted, his first since 2020’s It Is What It Is, takes its inspiration from the non-stop barrage of information we now call modern life, though he’s careful not to languish in despair or, worse yet, pessimism. Instead, distractions become a point of inspiration, an almost necessary salve to make it through each day. “A kid that’s afraid of getting shots and stuff, you go to the doctor, and they kind of wave something in front of them and then give him the shot. Sometimes distraction can be good,” he says.

On a recent visit to Rolling Stone’s New York City office, he wears an eclectic assortment of jewelry—from medieval-looking rings to an armor plate fresh out of Game of Thrones. “Sometimes you need battle armor,” he jokes. Protection is another theme of Distracted, an album as concerned with the modern condition as it is with themes of loss and grief, which have existed in the background of much of Thundercat’s music. His last project, which earned him a Grammy for Best Progressive R&B Album, dealt heavily with the loss of his friend Mac Miller, whose verse is featured early on Distracted. This latest album arrived as Thundercat, born Stephen Bruner in Los Angeles, grappled with the loss of another creative partner and friend, music executive and concert producer Meghan Stabile, whom he references directly on “Candlelight.” “She was a candlelight,” he says. “And life has a funny way of making it complicated, and she was kind of a light to me and my family.”

It is a rousing tribute, with his featherlight vocals gliding breezily over intricate instrumentation from producer and multi-instrumentalist Greg Kurstin, virtuosic jazz keyboardist DOMi Louna, and prodigious drummer JD Beck, the latter two comprising the Grammy-nominated jazz duo DOMi & JD Beck. “It’s between me, Greg Kurstin, JD, and Domi,” Thundercat explains. “When you have musicianship, it’s a language. It was really beautiful coming up with that song.” Thundercat is by now aware of how grief looms over so many of his releases, though he doesn’t interpret it with a sense of gloom but instead a kind of zen acceptance. Grief is more like a condition of life than something one goes through. “It’s like, you never stop learning, you get better at things with time,” he says. “But yeah, it was a lot to learn in between the last album and this one.”

Sonically, Distracted picks up where It Is What It Is left off—a kaleidoscopic, free-flowing, and jazz-infused journey through a range of musical instincts. The album’s adventurousness mirrors the themes at play, as Thundercat describes his own form of creative restlessness. “The way I learned to sit comfortably with myself was that a couple of things would have to be going on at one time,” he says. “Even practicing my instrument, to some degree, has had to be subconscious for me. So I don’t know, somewhere in between, the distraction is either the worst or best thing that can happen sometimes.”

A classic form of songcraft courses through the album. Tracks like “What is Left to Say” have the vintage melody of a Brat Pack-era love song, if Sinatra were crooning about situationships, which, in a way, maybe he was. Distracted achieves an exciting flattening of time; the songs here have a familiar lineage in popular music history—funk-inspired basslines trapeze into R&B rhythms and power-ballad synths. 

Meanwhile, a select cast of features enters Thundercat’s world. Lil Yachty joins in on “I Did This To Myself,” reprising his indie-leaning turn from Let’s Start Here. Kevin Parker of Tame Impala, who helped craft Yachty’s psychedelic rock moment, appears on “No More Lies,” a song that Thundercat says was a culmination of many years of mutual admiration. “We had met each other at the Grammys years before, but if you see this photo of us, we look stupid as hell. He’s got his glasses on. I got my glasses on. [Flying] Lotus has his glasses on. We’re all like, ‘Oh God.’ It’s like, you got us out of a cave,” he recalls. “I love all of their work. I always have. I think to some degree, he was kind of, in a way, maybe taken aback by how it worked so well. But I always say, nothing makes up for the language. And when you have any bit of it, it just works.”

A previously unreleased verse from Miller shows up on “She Knows Too Much,” a breezy romp that manages to skirt the line between vulnerability and toxic male angst.  “We never knew where it was going to go,” Thundercat says of the posthumous verse. “Like he had places he wanted to touch, and he was prepared to do that. And in this song, this was like canon for us. It was kind of like, ‘We’re going to come back to that.’”

The song hits on the album’s take on modern romance, which many would attest is nothing short of a hellscape. There’s a particular anxiety plaguing young men, dubbed the “Male Loneliness Epidemic” by some. The idea is that men are finding it more difficult than in previous generations to find a mate. Thundercat approaches this malaise with his signature sense of humor. “I feel like just at every point, everybody just wants every dude to just walk off into the ocean, give some loud war cry, and just blast lasers up to heaven,” he says, perhaps half-jokingly. “Then just go kill yourself, walk off a cliff. That’s what everything feels like right now.”

Technology looms over the record, a constant source of its titular distraction, and a kind of existential threat to connection. “The internet gives the illusion of options. There are apps, and then you go and find your boyfriend or your girlfriend on the app; it’s hard to sift through. It’s complicated, but that’s our problem to deal with.”

Thundercat’s last album arrived just as a global pandemic upended society, and his latest is “following suit with insanity,” he says. As such, Distracted feels like a record of the times, in a world as burned out as it is online, endlessly scrolling but rarely present. “The main takeaway from the album? Sometimes it’s okay to be distracted. But [in] most situations it isn’t,” Thundercat says.“I think we can all be honest, we’re all kind of distracted right now, and we’re trying not to be, but sometimes you need that little break.”