We live in an inattentive world. Many of us have forgotten how to sit quietly and just listen, as instead our brains insist that the next TikTok video will be the dopamine hit we need to escape the snares of the attention economy. “Sometimes you need to be distracted to focus in a different way,” Thundercat’s Stephen Bruner declared in an early press quote in the lead-up to his new album’s release. Bruner is wrestling with that fragmentation of life on Distracted, his long-awaited fifth album, and bringing his friends along for the ride.
It’s been six years since It Is What It Is, Bruner’s GRAMMY-winning album that felt like a jazz-fusion funeral procession held in outer space. Projects like 2011’s The Golden Age of Apocalypse and 2013’s Apocalypse introduced us to Thundercat’s unique R&B pop stylings, but it was 2017’s Drunk that crystallized his singular solo voice. Fresh off being a major presence on Kendrick Lamar’s instant-classic rap colossus To Pimp a Butterfly, Drunk’s emotional whiplash was a precursor to Distracted in the way that its genre influences fell in and out of the slipstream and sorrow hid behind comedic jabs. In turn, It Is What It Is slowed Thundercat's pace, permitting grief to ride shotgun. Distracted gets on with it through the grooves, but the sadness is sitting in the backseat now. “I feel like it’s very much the tone of now,” Bruner tells me, his voice carrying that familiar mix of droll irony and startling sincerity. “It’s just very fitting to what life feels like right now: the age of too much information.” The ADHD energy of trying to lock into the present tense that won’t stop buffering is the world of Distracted.
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The record is Bruner’s most melodically adventurous so far, thanks in part to his collaboration with pop polymath producer Greg Kurstin. The shift in the production cockpit is notable: Where Flying Lotus usually steers the ship into jazz experimentalism, the producer, songwriter, and multi-instrumentalist brings a high-gloss sheen to everything. “Working with Greg was awesome,” remembers Bruner, following in the footsteps of Adele, Paul McCartney, Beck, Foo Fighters, and Maren Morris as Kurstin’s collaborator. “I wasn’t aware of how it would take shape through the course of this album...it was a suggestion that we worked together at one point, and here we are. He would complete sentences with me. We had so much to pull from between our ability to play and the equipment.”
The result is a beat-centric album bursting with ideas. Opener “Candlelight” sets the scene with a dedication to his late music teacher, Reggie Andrews, and jazz-scene staple Meghan Stabile. The former in particular helped shape the sound of generations as a musician, producer, and beloved educator. From mentoring future R&B, jazz, and rap stars to influencing countless young musicians in South Los Angeles, his legacy reaches far beyond the stage. For Bruner, the track is a heavy memorial and a joyful burst of rhythm simultaneously. “Anybody that got a chance to be [Reggie’s] student, he became like a dad,” Thundercat said in a 2020 Downbeat interview. “He’s part of LA’s real history.”
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“I feel like it’s very much the tone of now. It’s just very fitting to what life feels like right now: the age of too much information.”
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The specters of the digital age haunt every groove of Distracted. On the standout track “ADD Through the Roof,” Bruner tackles our collective mental fragmentation with a shrug and a bass fill. “If you own a cell phone, bro, basically you’re cooked,” he laughs, though the humor is serrated. “I’m just raw-dogging my emotions. Everybody’s trying to find a way to rationalize the most irrational shit. It’s almost like maltodextrin—the electronic maltodextrin. It’s built for speed and comfort, and it’s a complex thing to try to navigate.”
Bruner’s past nerd-culture iconography isn’t hindered by more serious subject matter on Distracted, as it most notably takes center stage on “Anakin Learns His Fate.” It’s a song that leans into the space-fantasy element of his persona, comparing the digital barrage of the 21st century to the fall of a Jedi. When I ask how the tragic arc of Darth Vader relates to being distracted, Bruner gets philosophical between the jokes. “His story is quite tragic—but is it, though? What’s the saying? ‘You live long enough to see yourself become the villain’? You keep going, you might come back around again. Maybe somebody’s got to chop your hand off or something.” It’s this playful approach to serious concepts that keeps the album from sinking into melodrama. Bruner acknowledges that we’re being “nerfed” the moment we leave the house—by the economy, by surveillance, by the “face hugger” proximity of our screens—but he softens it with the shorthand of deeply human connection.
Thundercat and Mac Miller / photo by Justin Boyd
“[My friendship with Mac Miller] felt like a roller coaster. It felt like a bowling alley—strikes and gutters. We were very much two dudes on a journey.”
Distracted’s emotional gravity is anchored by his lifelong love for collaboration. Whether Bruner is performing for Yo Gabba Gabba! or onstage with Spinal Tap and A$AP Rocky, he knows how to transition from working solo to deepening the groove with a fellow musician. Distracted features Willow, Remi Wolf, Lil Yachty, A$AP Rocky, Tame Impala, and the late Mac Miller, with each song sounding like conversations beginning in media res. On the Yachty-featuring “I Did This to Myself,” he also reunites with Flying Lotus, a partnership he describes as being “ingrained in our DNA.” FlyLo actually first encouraged Bruner to sing and make his own music. “We’ve worked very closely for years,” Bruner notes. “I mean, some people are meant to be in your life and you walk with them. Creativity is a piece of the fabric. Me and Lotus have been friends for years, and it’s crazy to watch our lives change and grow in the directions they have.” With FlyLo, there’s a lot understood implicitly between them. “It’s just like we don’t really have to speak. It just works. It’s something you can’t even make up for."
Another one of the pre-album singles, the Willow-featuring “ThunderWave,” is a warm breeze of quiet-storm R&B pop. Then there’s the unavoidable presence of Mac Miller on a striking time capsule of a track that utilizes files the two worked on before Miller’s passing in 2018. While Bruner is understandably protective of those specific memories, he uses the music video for “She Knows Too Much” as an illustration of their deep friendship. A consummate collaborator, Miller was always ready and tinkering in his garage whenever Thundercat pulled up. “I think that the video paints a very good picture of who we were,” he says. “It felt like a roller coaster. It felt like a bowling alley—strikes and gutters. We were very much two dudes on a journey, and that’s what that video is.”
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As our conversation winds down, we get around to talking about the first time Bruner ever picked up the bass. He travels back to the early 1990s, practicing along to the Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles II: The Secret of the Ooze soundtrack. It’s a fitting origin story for a man who’s spent his career bridging the gap between cartoonish fantasy and profound technical mastery. Bruner thinks he was always on a collision course with music-making. “I know I’ve always [had it],” he reflects. “Anytime I see my baby photos, it’s there. I think it took place before I could speak.”
Distracted is the sound of that lifelong voice trying to be heard over the endless scroll. The album ends with “You Left Without Saying Goodbye,” a haunting, Twin Peaks–esque finale that feels like a “period at the end of the sentence” for Thundercat—a moment of quiet in a very busy moment for the songwriter. “You have to always remember to find your way back to yourself,” Bruner concludes. In the neon-lit, rollercoaster world of Distracted, Thundercat hasn’t just found himself; he’s invited us to put down our phones and join him in the rhythm before we go full Anakin. Each song is a time machine that can transport you back to your own Secret of Ooze origin story and back again. FL
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